Marxism and the philosophy of science

Posted Aug 07, 2019 by Eds.

 Marxism , Philosophy  Global  Review

Originally published: Socialist Alternative by George Martin Fell Brown (August 1,

2019)   | 
Marxists are primarily known for their concern with the development of human
society and political struggle. As materialists, however, Marxists necessarily
look to developments in science and new ways of understanding the material
world. The Marxist interest in science entails both a search for a scientific
understanding of the material forces that shape society, as well as the ways
social forces shape our scientific understanding itself. Under capitalism,
however, the Marxist interest in science hasn’t been accompanied by an
embrace of Marxism by scientists. Capitalism portrays science as a purely
objective phenomenon and considers any attempt at understanding the political
implications of science to be an intrusion of ideology into the sphere of
objective, scientific neutrality.

This distrustful attitude of scientists towards Marxism has been exacerbated by

the legacy of Stalinism. In addition to waging a campaign of bureaucratic
counter-revolutionary terror, Stalinism cracked down on significant scientific
developments, dismissing genetics, modern physics, and important
breakthroughs in psychology, while promoting pseudo-scientific ideas like
Lysenkoism. All of this was done in the name of Marxism, which made it all the
easier for capitalists to hold it up as a warning of the danger of letting politics
interfere with science. Through this the forces of both Stalinism and capitalism
served to bury a vibrant legacy of genuine Marxist thought concerning questions
of science and the philosophy of science.

With this in mind, the recent republication of Helena Sheehan’s Marxism and

the Philosophy of Science can only be welcomed. Originally written in 1985, but
reprinted at the end of 2017, Sheehan’s book recounts a wide history of serious
Marxist thought on science starting with Marx and Engels themselves, and
going up to the mass workers’ movements of the 1930s and 1940s. In keeping
with a dialectical conception of science, Marxist ideas aren’t presented as static
but evolving through debate and experiment in the face of new scientific and
political challenges. This is a history of revolutionaries grappling with the
scientific revolutions of their day, of a flourishing of scientific development in
post-revolutionary Russia, of the strangling of that development under Stalinist
degeneration, and of a new wave of politicized scientists in the west coming to
terms with the political implications of their work.
Sheehan reveals the philosophical outlook of Marxism, often termed “dialectical
materialism” to be infinitely more vibrant than the Stalinist caricature that
persists in the popular imagination. More importantly she reveals it to be far
more vibrant than the views on science that dominate the capitalist world.
Western, non-Marxist philosophy of science, has created its own historical
lineage of figures like Mach, Carnap, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend.
This lineage often featured philosophers dramatically overturning the over-
simplistic conceptions of their predecessors, only to replace them with new
over-simplistic conceptions of their own. As Sheehan points out “The trajectory
of this tradition, from positivism to the current variety of postpositivist
philosophies of science, has reflected the pressure of a complex reality upon
conceptions too restricted to give an adequate account of it.”

The Marxist tradition, Sheehan points out, provides an alternate view of the
history of science. Responding to the same “pressure of a complex reality” the
Marxist dialectical approach proved much more resilient, as we’ll examine later.

When this book was first published in 1985, neoliberalism was in the midst of an
ideological counter-revolution against socialist and Marxist ideas. But in the field
of science, there was still a minority, including figures like Richard Lewontin
and Richard Levins as well as the Science for the People movement, who kept
fighting the good fight.
The republication of the book comes in a very different time period, one of rising
support for socialist ideas, as well as rising discussion around the relation of
science and politics. Donald Trump’s attacks on climate science provoked the
March for Science, the largest demonstration of scientists in world history.
Meanwhile political conflict has flared up within the scientific community as
ideas of “race science” have made a comeback among on the far right. In this
situation, a better understanding of Marxist views on science, as presented in
this book, can be a valuable tool.

Marx, Engels, and Dialectical Materialism

The Marxist conception of philosophy of science began, of course, with Marx
and Engels themselves. Sheehan puts these ideas in the context of the
nineteenth-century thought they came out of. The previous century saw the
enlightenment promise to do away with religious and idealist ideas once and for
all with a thorough-going materialist worldview. “Idealism,” in the philosophical
sense, refers to the approach that sees ideas or the spirit as the basis of reality,
while “materialism” sees the natural universe as the basis. By the nineteenth
century, materialism had run into hurdles, seeing a resurgence of idealist
thought in the form of Hegel, who challenged the rigid, mechanical formulations
of the enlightenment ideas. Marx and Engels came out of the Young Hegelian
movement, which tried to more extensively engage in political struggle. And
engaging in these struggles brought Marx and Engels back to materialism, but
of a different kind than during the enlightenment.

As Marx and Engels threw themselves into the political struggles and
revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century they sought, more than any of their
political contemporaries, to understand the real-life social forces shaping those
political struggles. They looked to the process of labor, the conscious human
interaction with nature, and the relations of production, as the basis of those
forces. Wider political and ideological questions couldn’t be separated from this
interaction but rather had to be seen in terms of the labor and class relations in
society. And changing society required understanding the way those classes
come into conflict and how social relations break down and transform. This
necessitated a materialist worldview applied to questions of history and politics,
which had been absent in their Young Hegelian milieu.
Materialist ideas in science predate Marx and Engels by quite a bit, with forms
of materialism going as far back as ancient Greece and being a significant part
of the philosophy of the enlightenment in the eighteenth century. But the
application of materialist methods for understanding the internal workings of
society was a revolutionary contribution in more ways than one. Not only did it
point to direct social and political revolution, it pointed to a different
understanding of materialism itself. The materialism of the enlightenment
philosophers was a highly mechanical conception, reducing nature and society
to fixed objects either existing in stasis or confined to simple motion. The
materialist conception of history put forward by Marx and Engels didn’t adhere
to that approach.

This is where Marx and Engels brought in the dialectical ideas from their Young
Hegelian upbringing. A dialectical approach to the universe saw objects, ideas,
and other categories as dynamic and fluid. Things couldn’t be reduced to fixed
categories, but had to be seen as a complex of contradictory processes, coming
into being, impacting each other, and becoming transformed into other
categories. This was Hegel’s approach, but Hegel saw these contradictions and
transformations as taking place only within the world of ideas. From Marx and
Engels’ materialist perspective, these contradictions and transformations are
part of nature itself.

In the world of science, new discoveries were taking place that increasingly
confirmed Marx and Engels’ dialectical worldview and calling into question the
mechanical approach put forward by previous materialists. The discovery of
geological time early in the nineteenth century, and the discovery of biological
evolution in the middle of the century revealed the dialectical character of nature
itself. If the Hegelians responded to these developments by eschewing
materialism, many of the scientific thinkers of the time attempted to address the
question through increased reductionism or increased fracturing of science into
different specialties. Marx and Engels paid close attention to new scientific
developments and, as scientific questions increasingly collided with political
questions, Engels directly brought up this dialectical conception of nature.

Sheehan discusses three key works of Engels on the question: Anti-

Dühring, The Dialectics of Nature, and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of
Classical German Philosophy. The first of these was a polemic against Eugen
Dühring, a briefly popular figure in the socialist movement, who put forward a
crudely mechanical and schematic approach to science and politics. The
Dialectics of Nature was an unfinished work, inspired by Marx’s own desire to
write a work salvaging what was rational in Hegel’s thought. And Ludwig
Feuerbach was a historical account of the philosophical road leading from
Hegel to Marx.
In these works Engels grappled with a number of scientific questions of his day,
from a dialectical perspective. He pointed to a number of the laws of
development Hegel had put forward, such as the transformation of quantity into
quality, and pointed out how they arise in nature and not simply in thought, as
Hegel had put forward. He looked into how social conditions shaped scientific
discovery.

In addressing developments like Darwin’s ideas of evolution and natural

selection, he made some contributions of his own, pointing to the role of labor in
the evolution of consciousness. These ideas served both to challenge some of
the crude “social Darwinist” ideas – which stated that capitalism and imperialism
were a “natural” state of affairs, embodying the “struggle of the fittest” – while
still defending the legitimacy of Darwinism against neo-Lamarckian ideas
espoused by figures on the left like Dühring. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was an
advocate of evolution predating Darwin who advocated the inheritance of
acquired characteristics, rather than natural selection, as the basis for evolution.
Dühring identified natural selection with “social Darwinist” ideas and turned back
to Lamarck’s ideas on moral grounds. Ironically, when Stalin waged his war on
genetics, he was actually putting forward the very neo-Lamarckian ideas Engels
polemicized against.

Sheehan contrasts Engels favorably with a number of other philosophers of

science who have more respectability in the bourgeois media. Many ideas
attributed to twentieth century philosophers were formulated earlier by Engels
and with much more nuance. This is seen in Engels’s critique of “positivism.”
“Positivism” refers to the rejection of philosophy in favor of adopting an (often
oversimplified) understanding of natural science as the basis for all theoretical
and practical activity. The critique of the simplistic positivistic conception of
scientific discovery, with its crude emphasis on induction, is often attributed to
the reactionary “Cold-War Warrior” Karl Popper. But Engels already raised such
criticisms long before Popper, and Popper only replaced one simplistic
conception with another. Meanwhile, Engels put forward ideas of scientific
revolutions and crises that are often attributed to Popper’s opponent, Thomas
Kuhn. But Engels brought in a wider social dynamic behind his conception of
scientific revolutions that Kuhn didn’t employ.
Sheehan also deals with some controversies that have developed in academic
Marxist circles around the relation of Marx to Engels. Various academic trends,
either adhering to a crude materialism or a rejection of materialism, have tried to
attribute dialectical materialist ideas exclusively to Engels. Either Marx was a
positivist and Engels smuggled in dialectics, or Marx was a Hegelian idealist
and Engels smuggled in materialism. Since Marx’s published writings didn’t deal
as extensively with science as Engels’, this allowed some leeway for these
interpretations. But Sheehan clearly shows these ideas are unfounded, pointing
to numerous instances of Marx explicitly defending materialist and dialectical
conceptions of science.

Since Sheehan’s book was first published in 1985, even further evidence has
come out challenging these academic Marxist misconceptions. Previously
unpublished scientific notebooks of Marx’s have been re-discovered, with
extensive attention given to questions of ecology and agricultural science. More
recent writings by John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett, and Kohei Saito have
revealed new dimensions of a dialectical approach to science in these writings.
In addition, more is known about the role of Carl Schorlemmer, the “red
chemist,” an organic chemist and Fellow of the Royal Society who collaborated
closely with Marx and Engels and actively embraced a dialectical approach to
science.
Given that new research, it’s unfortunate that it doesn’t appear in Sheehan’s
book. One can imagine that if it had been written today, Sheehan would have a
lot more to say on the topic.

The “Crises” in Marxism and Physics

As a worldview, Marxism was the product of clashes with other political trends
on the left, from anarchism to utopian socialism to Blanquist putschism, and of
ideological clashes with bourgeois economists and scientists. This is in contrast
to more undialectical ideologies, which try to derive their worldview from first
principles. Following Marx and Engels’ deaths, Marxism wasn’t just the thought
of one or two individuals, but of a whole movement, organized in the Second
International, modeled off of the International Workingman’s Association of the
time of Marx and Engels.

The late 19th and early 20th century saw a prolonged period of stability for
capitalism that provoked what was deemed a “crisis in Marxism.” A trend
around Eduard Bernstein sought to ditch Marx’s revolutionary politics in favor of
bringing about change solely through reforms. This debate took on a
philosophical component as the reformists also relied on a neo-Kantian revival
in popular philosophy. Meanwhile, another wing of the movement, centering
around Alexander Bogdanov in Russia and Anton Pannekoek in the
Netherlands, defended revolutionary politics from a crude, ultra-left, voluntaristic
perspective, and appealed to a new wave of positivist philosophy around the
physicist Ernst Mach.
The wider development of the neo-Kantian and Machian schools was less
motivated by the “crisis in Marxism” and more by a concurrent “crisis in
physics.” The Newtonian revolution in physics had exhausted itself, and new
discoveries were poking holes in its foundations. The neo-Kantian movement
reflected an increasing distrust in science and especially the possibility of
scientific progress. Machism was an attempt at defending science by clearing
away the problems of previous schools of positivism. Mach tried to build a
“second wave of positivism” which downplayed the original positivists’ focus on
scientific laws and objects in favor of the methods and processes of science. As
with many undialectical approaches to science, it was able to point to legitimate
problems with previous undialectical conceptions, only to replace them with new
problems.

In the year 1905, two revolutionary events occurred. In Russia, the workers rose
up against tsarism, setting up soviets, or workers’ councils, posing the
possibility of overthrowing capitalism for the first time since the Paris Commune.
The uprising was defeated, but it would prove to be a “dress rehearsal”
preparing the Russian masses for the successful revolution of 1917. At the
same time, Albert Einstein began a revolution in physics with his discovery of
the theories of special and general relativity. These developments pointed the
way to resolving both the “crisis in Marxism” and the “crisis in physics.” But it
would take time.

Sheehan goes over the various debates within the Second International and
comes out with a critical view of many of the leaders of the International for their
failure to adequately address the scientific questions. To varying degrees, most
of the leading theoreticians of the International, from Karl Kautsky to Paul
Lafargue to the Austro-Marxists, sought to reduce the scope of Marxism, either
to just economics, or just history. Questions of science and philosophy were
treated as private matters. So while Kautsky critiqued Bernstein for his political
positions, he argued that Bernstein’s philosophical views were still compatible
with Marxism.
Not all of the thinkers of the Second International held that view. Joseph
Dietzgen and Antonio Labriola took a more serious approach to philosophy.
Most importantly, Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, took the
philosophical questions very seriously, and he and the resulting Russian Marxist
movement would make the most thorough-going critiques of these new
philosophical trends.

In their own ways, neo-Kantianism and Machism posed a challenge to

materialism primarily on the plane of epistemology: the branch of philosophy
dealing with knowledge. A materialist conception would hold that our knowledge
of the outside world in some way reflects or corresponds to material reality. The
seeming “crisis in physics” revealed that a lot of previously accepted knowledge
of physics didn’t correspond to reality. But the solutions posed by neo-
Kantianism and Machism only added new problems.

The neo-Kantians argued that there was a rigid separation between

the phenomenon, the thing as it appears, and the noumenon, the thing in itself.
With this rigid separation between perception and reality, the discovery of truth
was confined to “pure reason” and universal principles disconnected from
experience. The scientific understanding of society was rejected and socialism,
if defended at all, had to be seen as a “moral imperative.”
The Machians took the opposite approach to the neo-Kantians. They saw
perception and reality as identical and dismissed as metaphysics the very idea
of any form of reality existing beyond the realm of perception. When scientists
were first coming to terms with the limitations of Newtonian mechanics, Mach’s
ideas held a certain appeal. But the more relativity and quantum physics were
formalized and standardized, the less use Machism had, and this sort of
subjective idealism has increasingly been associated with anti-scientific
philosophies like postmodernism.

Sheehan points out that Plekhanov, and many other leaders of the Russian
Marxist movement, took thorough philosophical aim at these ideas. But they
generally avoided taking this philosophical debate into the “crisis in physics”
itself. The main exception to this was Lenin, in his 1909 book Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism. This was a response to the Machian ideas of Bogdanov, who
was playing an ultra-left role within Lenin’s Bolshevik faction of the Russian
Social Democratic and Labor Party. Bogdanov had failed to come to terms with
the defeat of the 1905 revolution and was increasingly pushing for adventuristic
tactics to will the revolution back into existence, backing this up with appeals to
Mach’s ideas. Even though Lenin wasn’t a scientist, he was forced to take up
the debates in the scientific community as they had spilled over into politics.
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism argues that, in contrast to the claims of Mach,
material reality does, in fact, exist outside of direct perception. The problem
wasn’t with materialist epistemology, but with an undialectical, metaphysical
materialism, that conflated an era’s conception of reality with reality in general.
Due to the nature of dialectics, material reality was in flux, and our ideas of
reality were only partial reflections. This open-ended conception meant new
discoveries would be made that would require updating our understanding of
how material reality operated, but didn’t negate the existence of objective reality
or our ability to understand it.
There are many limitations of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and it remains
a deeper cut of Lenin’s oeuvre. The revolution in physics was only in the
process of being completed, and the book still references things like the
luminiferous ether, which was thrown out by the development of relativity
theory, but was still being included in the textbooks of the time. Meanwhile
quantum physics wouldn’t be formalized until after Lenin’s death, so it’s not
dealt with in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism at all. Lenin also makes some
unnecessary concessions to the positivists he’s debating with, for instance
overstating the role of passive perception in obtaining knowledge at the
expense of more active experience. But it is has stood the test of time much
more so than the neo-Kantian and Machist ideas he was challenged with.
After Stalin came to power in the Soviet Union, many of the ideas Lenin put
forward in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism would be distorted beyond
recognition. Lenin was fundamentally defending the new scientific ideas while
challenging the bad philosophical views that had accompanied them. Stalin, on
the other hand, conflated the scientific ideas with the philosophical ideas, and
insisted that relativity and quantum physics themselves were bourgeois
perversions. Cold War anti-Communists tended to take Stalin at his word when
he claimed to be espousing Lenin’s views, and this was used to levy a number
of unfounded attacks on Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Lenin’s real
contribution was buried under these twin distortions. And it wasn’t the only
Marxist contribution to science to be buried by Stalinism and Cold War anti-
Communism.
Science After October
In contrast to the reputation set by Stalin, the immediate aftermath of the
Russian Revolution saw a widening of discussion and debate on scientific and
philosophical thought. The Bolsheviks made conscious efforts to win scientists
to the revolution. While Lenin and Trotsky rejected many of the bourgeois
caricatures of science, they likewise rejected the idea that revolutionaries could
simply conjure up their own “proletarian science.” Dialectical materialism
presupposes an open-ended conception of science, and Lenin and Trotsky
specifically looked to “militant materialist” natural scientists, whether Marxist or
not, to develop a more thorough-going dialectical materialism.
The Bolshevik government set up a number of scientific institutions and
journals. And they consciously cultivated a wide freedom of discussion on
scientific and philosophical matters. Many of the Machians who Lenin had
harshly polemicized against were given prominent positions in the scientific
institutions. And a wide variety of philosophical schools popped up, many at
odds with Marxist views. Sheehan describes these schools, giving focus on the
two most prominent: the mechanists and the Deborinites.

The mechanist school developed a wide following among natural scientists

attracted to the Russian Revolution. Diverging wildly from a traditional Marxist
conception, they adopted a strong positivist approach that saw the development
of science as a replacement for all philosophy, including dialectical materialism.
While among the most ultra-left figures in combating religious superstitions that
remained in the Soviet Union, they tended to be more conservative when it
came to the prejudices that existed within the scientific community itself.

Traditionally a “mechanical” or “mechanistic” approach is presented as the

opposite of a dialectical approach. And in many ways, the mechanist school
advocated the rigid fixed categories that Hegel and Marx had rebelled against.
The Soviet mechanist school didn’t reject dialectics as wrong per se. Rather
they saw scientific development as going in a more dialectical direction to the
point where new understandings of the disturbance and re-establishment of
equilibrium could subsume notions of dialectical contradiction. The mechanistic
philosopher I.I. Skortsov-Stepanov argued that “the dialectical understanding of
nature takes concrete form precisely as the mechanical understanding.”
However many of these new scientific ideas would themselves become ossified
and overturned in later scientific revolutions, and dialectics still remains
necessary to understand the development of science.
The other major scientific school centered around the figure of Abram Deborin.
Deborin was a Menshevik and a disciple of Plekhanov who broke with the
Mensheviks to support the Russian Revolution. He was well-versed in Marxist
philosophy and fully embraced a dialectical approach. But he drew more of his
support from professional philosophers than natural scientists, and his school
was often prone to less rigorous and more abstract arguments. The debate
between the mechanists and Deborinites grew throughout the 1920s.

An important component of this debate concerned the relation of social and

political transformation to science. The mechanists, while seeing science as
playing a role in the material development of society, saw science itself as a
neutral and objective study, unshaped by social change. The Deborinites had a
clearer view of the way that different social systems shape scientific discovery.
But they also saw science as exclusively part of the “ideological superstructure”
in society. But science is a complicated process that can’t fit into one distinct
role. The process of scientific research and discovery is shaped by both the
“economic base” and the “ideological superstructure,” but science itself studies
phenomena in nature that have their own laws, operating independently of both.

In spite of, or because of, these debates, Soviet science was able to see
serious advancements that culminated in the impact of the Soviet delegation at
the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology
held in London in 1931. The delegation, headed by Nikolai Bukharin, brought
thinkers from all sides in the debates, and made the case for the Marxist
contribution to science. The conference had a profound effect on many radical
British scientists in the 1930s. And the delegation’s documents, published under
the title Science at the Crossroads, would provide inspiration for a later
generation of radical scientists in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But much of the progress
represented at this conference would be squelched under the bureaucratic
counter-revolution already in progress.
Stalin’s Counter-Revolution in Science
As vibrant scientific debates were taking place throughout Soviet society,
another, much less vibrant, “debate” was taking place in Soviet political life. The
isolation of the Soviet Union lead to the consolidation of an increasingly
parasitic bureaucracy centered around the figure of Joseph Stalin. After
consolidating a bureaucratic counter-revolutionary dictatorship, Stalin
proceeded to carry out a counter-revolution in the sphere of science. The
Bolsheviks’ encouragement of scientific debate was put to an end. The
bureaucracy now enshrined specific scientific principles, often of dubious merit.
Defenders of legitimate scientific discoveries were thrown into gulags or
executed. And all of this was done in the name of “Marxism.”
During the late 1920s, Stalin confined his purge to his immediate political
opponents among the Bolsheviks, first lining up with Bukharin to crush Trotsky’s
Left Opposition, and then turning his guns on Bukharin, who formed his own
Right Opposition. However, it was still possible to carry on debate about
scientific and philosophical questions, provided they were sufficiently detached
from the main political disputes. But by the ‘30s, the counter-revolution had
expanded to all spheres of Soviet political life, science included. The two wings
of the scientific debates of the ‘20s were arbitrarily identified with different
opposition groupings, with the mechanists being identified with Bukharin, and
the Deborinites with Trotsky. Those opposition groupings were then falsely
charged with being fascist agents as part of an increasingly wild official
conspiracy theory.

Purges in the field of psychology put a premature halt to the pioneering work of
Lev Vygotsky. In the field of physics, even though Lenin had explicitly defended
the compatibility of relativity theory with dialectical materialism, the Stalinist
bureaucracy insisted otherwise. And in biology, even though Engels expressly
defended Darwinian natural selection against the neo-Lamarckianism of
Dühring, the Stalinists propped up the neo-Lamarckian agronomist Trofim
Lysenko as the face of Soviet Science.

Lysenko rejected the legitimacy of genetics and argued that inheritance of

acquired characteristics could allow crops to be rapidly bred to grow in
environments they weren’t suited for. The very science of genetics was
denounced as bourgeois ideology. Biologists who opposed Lyenkoism, such as
Israel Agol and Max Levin were arrested and shot under charges of Trotskyism.
Lysenkoism continued into the ‘40s using more and more dubious scientific
methods and claiming increasingly implausible results. During the Cold War,
anti-Communists would point to the “Lysenko affair” in an attempt to dismiss
Marxism as a whole.

The Stalinist bureaucracy, however, was prone to numerous zigzags, both

political and philosophical. During World War II, the Soviet military relied on a
serious approach to science, at least in certain fields. This forced the
bureaucracy to eventually embrace the new physics, and most Soviet physicists
were spared from the purges. And while Stalin put forward a caricature of
dialectics in the ‘30s, the nationalist promotion of anti-German sentiments
during the war led Stalin to downgrade dialectics altogether, holding up formal
logic so that “Soviet men may learn to think effectively” while dismissing Hegel
as a mere “aristocratic reaction to the French Revolution.”

Sheehan’s history only goes up to 1948, so it doesn’t cover what happened to

Soviet science after then. In spite of Stalin’s political and scientific counter-
revolution, Soviet science nonetheless made enormous contributions after
World War II. A key event highlighting was the launching of Sputnik 1, the first
artificial satellite, into orbit in 1957. This was a huge shock to U.S. imperialism
which led to a massive investment in the race to get to the moon as well as
more investment in science education generally.

The successes of Soviet science stemmed from the fact that, in spite of its
bureaucratic degeneration, the Soviet Union maintained a planned economy.
Science education and research was seen as a priority and received significant
state support. The planned economy allowed Russia to rapidly develop from a
mostly illiterate semi-feudal country under Tsarism, to a world leader in science
and mathematics under the Soviet Union. However, this success was hampered
by the lack of a dialectical materialist approach to science. This, and the lack of
democracy within the planned economy, caused Soviet science to replicate
some of the problems of capitalist science. This was most stark in the case of
the environment. The Soviet bureaucracy’s refusal to consider the
environmental impact of the forced pace of industrialization resulted in
Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the ecosystem collapse of the Aral sea.

Sheehan does a good job at outlining the decline in scientific thought that took
place under Stalin. But she falters when trying to understand how it happened.
She suggests that, had Trotsky or Bukharin succeeded Lenin instead of Stalin,
things would have turned out for the better. In her new afterword to the current
edition of the book, she more explicitly aligns herself with Bukharin rather than
Trotsky. While she correctly rejects the Stalinists’ false identification of Trotsky
with Deborinism, she makes her own strained attempt to identify him with the
mechanist school. And she makes no attempt to understand Trotsky’s theory of
the Thermidorean counter-revolution in Soviet politics, which is vital to
understanding the social basis of the counter-revolution in Soviet science.

Unlike Trotsky, Sheehan rejects the notion of a “river of blood” separating

Stalinism from genuine Bolshevism. This means that Sheehan is at times both
overcritical of Lenin and undercritical of Stalin. At one point she blames
“aspects of Bolshevik revolutionary traditions” such as “an insurrectionist
mentality, an intolerance towards those who opposed them in good faith, a
tendency to subordinate means to ends.” And she sometimes implies that the
harsh tone Lenin used in some of his polemics facilitated Stalinism. But at other
times, she seems to be making excuses for Stalinism, with comments like “To a
degree, perhaps, it was the enormity of their efforts that dictated the enormity of
their mistakes. Those who dare little make fewer mistakes and those who dare
much make many.”

The Russian Revolution had overthrown capitalism and landlordism,

establishing a planned economy and workers’ democracy. The Stalinist
bureaucracy was able to develop because of the isolation of the Revolution, but
soon crystalized into a social force in its own right. The planned economy
remained, and many of the problems with science under capitalism were
overcome. But science under Stalinism was shaped in the interests of the
Stalinist bureaucracy just as science under capitalism is shaped by the interests
of the capitalist class. The bureaucracy relied on scientific development when it
was directly necessary to developing the productive forces. This resulted in a
massive expansion of scientific education in the Soviet Union rivalling the
United States. But the numerous bureaucratic zigzags and accompanying
purges saw some of the worst pseudo-scientific excesses being peddled in the
name of Marxism.

International Debates
The positive impact of the Russian Revolution and the negative impact of the
Stalinist counter-revolution weren’t confined to the Soviet Union itself. The
Russian Revolution spurred the formation of the Communist International in
1919, bringing revolutionary Marxism to a wider international audience. Under
Stalinism, however, this institution was converted into an arm of Soviet foreign
policy. Outside the Soviet Union, however, it was still possible for independent
Marxist forces to challenge the Stalinist line. But not all of these forces were
equal.

Academic trends in Marxism developed that rejected the Stalinist caricatures of

science. But these trends tended to throw the baby out with the bathwater,
dismissing any role for Marxism in scientific understanding. In Europe, trends
associated with Karl Korsch, György Lukács, and the “left communists” – who
Lenin polemicized against – launched a neo-Hegelian revival, championing
dialectics, but rejecting the more materialist aspects of Marxist thought. In
America, a group of academics independent of the Communist International
formed around Max Eastman and Sidney Hook, which sought to meld Marxist
politics with the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey. These philosophers were
very much in favor of science, but saw dialectics as a mystical hangover from
Hegel that had to be discarded for Marxism to be truly scientific.

From opposite directions, these two academic trends converged on a hostility to

Friedrich Engels, especially his Dialectics of Nature. Hook argued that Marx
was abandoning the dialectics of his youth and moving towards pragmatism, but
that Engels insisted on smuggling it back in. Lukács, on the other hand, argued
that Engels failed to truly grasp Marx’s dialectics by trying to smuggle in natural
science, which Lukács identified with positivism. These diametrically opposed
critiques of Engels had an unfortunate impact on later generations of academic
Marxism, where Marx was twisted into being an advocate of whatever
philosophical fad was popular at the time, while Engels was charged with
smuggling in whatever aspects of Marxism were at odds with that philosophical
fad.
But there were others, like Trotsky, who challenged the Stalinist distortions of
dialectical materialism, while defending genuine dialectical materialism from the
attacks of the academics. By 1940 the conflict between the Trotskyists and the
American pragmatist Marxists featured in an open conflict within the Trotskyist
movement.

Sheehan mentions Trotsky’s defense of genuine dialectical materialism, and

credits other Trotskyist philosophers like George Novack and Pierre Naville for
their contributions. But her coverage of these debates is fairly skimpy. Her
coverage of the debates in Europe is much more fruitful, and brings up an often-
ignored flourishing of Marxism among scientists in 1930s Britain that made
significant contributions to advancing a dialectical approach to science.

At the 1931 presentation of Soviet scientists at the Second International

Congress of the History of Science and Technology in London, the most
prominent figure to take inspiration from this was J.D. Bernal, a pioneer in X-ray
crystallography and molecular biology. He became famous for his writings on
the history of science. Bernal stressed the powerful boost given to science by
the rise of capitalism. But the very scientific revolution unleashed by capitalism
had begun to outgrow capitalism. In Bernal’s Britain, scientific research was
being deprived of funding under the impact of the depression. In neighboring
Germany, science had been converted into a tool of Nazi barbarism. And, in
spite of the scientific progress of capitalism, pseudoscience and anti-science
ideas continue to proliferate to this day. Only the overthrow of capitalism and
the establishment of socialism would allow science to reach its full potential.
Sheehan also points to the figures of J.B.S. Haldane and Christopher
Cauldwell. Haldane was a biologist who became acquainted with Marxist
philosophy during a visit to the Soviet Union. Much of his work continued in the
tradition of Engels’ Dialectics of Nature but from the perspective of a full-time
scientist. Along with the Soviet scientist A.I. Oparin, he formulated the Oparin-
Haldane thesis concerning the origin of life. This thesis held that the early earth
developed a “prebiotic soup” of organic compounds that could allow life to come
into being given an appropriate energy source. As this new life dominated the
earth, they altered their environment, causing the prebiotic soup to give way to
the environment we’re more familiar with. This is now a commonly accepted
thesis that was one of the first contributions to science resulting from a
conscious application of dialectical materialism, rather than “unconscious
dialectics.”
Cauldwell, unlike Bernal and Haldane, wasn’t a research scientist, instead
working as a technical editor for an aeronautics journal. But he took a wide
interest all manner of science, art and Marxism. He put forward a unified critique
of a wide range of seemingly contradictory bourgeois cultural and philosophical
ideas. He described a growing separation of science and philosophy, with
science devolving into a crude positivism, and philosophy being subsumed into
anti-science mysticism. The controversies about the “crisis in physics” were a
consequence of new scientific discoveries being filtered through these
inadequate bourgeois ideas. And, in contrast to the Stalinists, he pointed out
how embracing the new developments in physics was not only compatible with
dialectical materialism, but easier to grasp from a dialectical perspective.

Unlike Trotsky, this school of British Marxist scientists never made a decisive
break with Stalinism. Their philosophical views were at odds with official
Stalinist principles and more in touch with genuine Marxism. But
organizationally, they remained affiliated to the Communist Party. This caused
some mental gymnastics when confronted with the reality of Stalinism. When
engaging in the scientific debates in British society, they were all willing to
staunchly defend the legitimacy of genetics against the Lysenkoist distortions.
But when confronted with the Soviet suppression of critics of Lysenkoism, they
tended to make awkward excuses to avoid taking a stand. And, like Sheehan
herself, they lacked Trotsky’s clear understanding of what was actually going on
in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless they represented some of the first instances of
scientists actively fusing their knowledge in both science and Marxism.

Relevance Today
Sheehan’s History ends in 1948. This date was picked because it served as a
hundredth anniversary of the publishing of the Communist Manifesto, making it
a centenary of Marxism in a sense. It also marked the consolidation of the Cold
War and the entrenchment of the Stalinist distortions of science. In the west,
academic Marxism also saw its own entrenchment, with the Lukács-inspired
hostility to science burying the legacy of figures like Bernal, Haldane, and
Cauldwell. And establishment academia in the west was able to consolidate a
full-scale rejection of Marxism in science.
Even without the benefit of Marxist philosophy, science has continued to make
breakthrough after breakthrough under capitalism. But while most scientists
don’t consciously adopt a dialectical philosophy, modern science can’t function
without dialectics. As such the achievements of science under capitalism
remain a product of unconscious dialectics. The resolution of the “crisis of
physics” could only be accomplished through a dialectical interpenetration of
opposites. Highly successful scientific theories like quantum physics, plate
tectonics, and the concept of an ecosystem are a confirmation of the Marxist
approach.

But capitalism has still proved unable to resolve its contradictions, including in
the field of science. In 1969, a new wave of radical scientists was born under
the name Science for the People. Science for the People revived interest in
Bernal, Haldane, and Cauldwell, while updating their views for the political and
scientific problems of a new period of struggle. This produced a revival of
Marxism in science, around figures such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levins,
Richard Lewontin, and Stephen Rose. Scientific developments such as Gould’s
theory of punctuated equilibrium show what can be achieved through conscious
dialectics in science.
The collapse of Stalinism and the neo-liberal counter-revolution set Marxism
back once again. But people are once more taking to struggle. And science has
become much more intertwined with these struggles. Capitalism’s role in the
global climate crisis reveals more sharply the need for a socialist approach to
science. Donald Trump’s attacks on science forced scientists to take to the
streets in record numbers. Previously accepted undialectical caricatures of
science, like biological determinism, have increasingly been wielded as
weapons of the far-right. And the adjunctification of academia has seen
scientists increasingly entering the ranks of the proletariat and engaging in labor
struggles more traditionally associated with the Marxist movement.

For scientists moving into struggle, or for any activists looking into the political
and philosophical implications of their struggles in the field of science, Helena
Sheehan’s history provides a useful guide.