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In the core countries of the global economic system, science has long
been a productive power. Universities and laboratories today have become
factories of knowledge and discovery, and scientists are the proletariat
of these factories. There has long been a critique of the role of
science and scientists in the capitalist system. What is happening with
science/scholarship in the core countries, what is the position of
science workers in Western universities and in particular, in the United
States? In this text we present an interview with Denys Bondar, a young
Ukrainian scientist working in one of the famous North American
universities.
Questions were asked by Stanislav Sergienko and Dmitry Ryder. Published
in Russian on September.media, this interview was translated into
English by Leyla Jafarova, Olena Lyubcheno, and Ben Siegelman.
Please tell us about your background. How did you become a leftist?
I come from Ukraine and in 2005 I moved to Canada for a PhD. Before this
I participated in the Orange Revolution. This experience greatly
influenced me – to be a part of a mass movement, it was something quite
extraordinary. But then I became disillusioned with the results of the
Orange Revolution and became apolitical. When the second Maidan began, I
was not yet a leftist, but I had leftist friends and colleagues who were
involved in leftist organizations in the US. I communicated with them,
but did not support their views strongly, saying something like, “I
remember the Soviet Union and the long lines, are you crazy?” After the
PhD, I moved to the US from Canada in 2011, just a month before Occupy
Wall Street. And I remember that even in Princeton, where I was based,
in a small elite town, there were three tents – a small Occupy. This was
a huge phenomenon. And I was thinking “what the hell, why are they
protesting? I wish we had their problems in Ukraine.” My leftist
political views began to form close to the time of the annexation of
Crimea and the beginning of serious, but not yet militarized, unrest in
Eastern Ukraine. And then I began to turn left politically and it was
very funny. There is this Ukrainian electronic newspaper, “Historical
Truth,” which during the time of the Maidan republished Trotsky’s
article of September 5, 1939, where he describes Stalin and Hitler. I
was shocked by how well-written Trotsky’s piece was. It felt incredibly
relevant to events that were unfolding. Honestly, on the one hand, I was
touched by this, and on the other hand there was a crisis of mainstream
media, not one single point of view that you heard was enough and did
not fully explain the complexity of the social dynamics. So Trotsky’s
‘old’ text was more modern than all these experts who appeared on TV day
and night. And this served as an impetus for becoming a leftist although
I could have become more rightist, but it turned out that I was in good
company and so I became a leftist.
full: http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/commercialization-science/
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