Rob Schaap wrote:
> I also don't really know what stuff
> like "Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound
> scientific knowledge" might be construed to mean in practice (personally,
> I'm not sure I know what it means in theory). It certainly has the
> potential to ignore constituencies, narrow debate, antagonise friends,
> marginalise issues, criminalise dissentors, and, oh, mebbe dry up into a
> static one-sided bureaucratic terror ...
The well-known medievalist and student of millenarianism Richard Landes (son of
notorious eurocentric historian David Landes) said on the mediev-l elist recently
(apropos of a discussion of Newton, alchemy and 'objective science'!):
>>look at the long-term problems and inherent weaknesses that otherwise
brilliant analysts like marx and freud imbedded in their work by trying to
make it scientific. and, of course, in the hands of zealots like the
communists, it was precisely the objective, scientific nature of marx's
history and theory that gave them the warrant to force the truth on so many
peoples. <<
Landes also seems to think, if I understand him aright, that there is a strong
connection historically-speaking between the mass appeal of monotheistic religions
(like both medieval Catholicism AND medieval Judaism) and their apocalyptic
eschatology (eg, the notion that there will be a Day of Judgment, followed by the
creation of Paradise, either on earth (Judaism, Marxism) or in Heaven (Pauline
Xianity, Islam etc). These kinds of egalitarian, millenarian movements/religions
tend to throw up highly autocratic, authoritarian and even repressive institutional
forms. Their final grounds for belief reside in the appeal to transcendental
arguments beyond the understanding let alone the judgment of the laity. Either God
or 'objective science' (equally incomprehensible to the layperson) will do. (Of
course, the argument that Marx was just a messianic Judaist in disguise is not new,
in any case).
The standard 'Stalinist' riposte to this way of looking at socialism as just another
opiate of the masses, is to object that, while religious belief not only needs but
even entails an act of faith, arguments grounded on scientific considerations are
open to popperian disproof; the layman may not understand them, but *someone* does,
and that is what matters. What's more, and classical stalinist apologists from
Lukacs onwards were highly receptive to epistemological disclaimers, thus it is
accepted that even the notion of what constitutes 'objectivity' is and always has
been itself capable of rational analyses and mutation. The key word here is
'dialectics' as in 'dialectical materialism'. See E V Ilyenko for a late version of
this kind of discussion (Brezhnev era). So for the Stalinists themselves, the
ordinary standards of scientific hypothesis, experimentation and proof apply, and
this is so even tho there were in practice obvious perversions of this process, for
eg when Stalin (no biologist and no physicist) adjudicated between Lysenko and
Vavilov, or established by pontifical statements the petit-bourgeois character of
Einsteinian relativity etc.
Departures from the norm are not unusual in any religion or any polity, however. The
fact that socialists have sometimes betrayed their professed commitment to science
does not invalidate the meaning and worth of the commitment itself. In any case, we
should not accuse Marx/Engels/Lenin of bad faith: it's clear enough what they were
getting at.
I think you'd have to demonstrate some OTHER and SUPERIOR means of creating
'socialist consciousness' other than by 'objective science', for your objection to
have force. Other than science, we only have the obscurantism of blind faith and
atavistic tribal desire, do we not? Science, as accumulated knowldge, as
methodology, philosophy and embodied social practice, does indeed have the
> potential to ignore constituencies, narrow debate, antagonise friends,
> marginalise issues, criminalise dissentors, and, oh, mebbe dry up into a
> static one-sided bureaucratic terror
but then so does practically anything else, including not only religion, but pop
music, art, social welfare systems, stolen elections, postmodernism --, oh, you name
it. It has the *potential* also to be the basis for social emancipation and for the
creation of just and solidaristic human lifeworlds which respect their natural
surroundings. Is there another way?
Mark
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