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This summer marks thirty years since the last issue of Science for the People was delivered to its subscribers in 1989. The magazine helped train a generation of unapologetic left-wing scientists to criticize and challenge the use of their work for violent and oppressive ends. From its enduring polemic against the latest variants of biological determinism to its critiques of weapons research and military funding on college campuses — and much more — Science for the People became an institution of radical thought and political struggle for its members and subscribers. Today, a new generation has revived the group, both as a membership organization and a periodical. In this piece, republished from the magazine’s summer 2019 relaunch collection, Helen Zhao reviews the critical contributions of the original Science for the People and challenges the new formation to revolutionize science and technology from within existing institutions. To receive the relaunch issue in print this summer, subscribe here.

A radical analysis must not confine itself to the business of critique — to dismantling dominant ways of thinking about the doing and making of science. A radical analysis must offer lessons for how to transform science in a revolutionary direction. How to remake science in the service of the people. This means using critique to inform our movement’s concrete plans for actualizing hopes, visions, and waking dreams of a science emancipated. This means setting a goal for radical analysis to guide our movement in its fight to reclaim science — currently complicit with and exploited by capital — weaponized against workers and the oppressed, and forged to reinforce ruling-class power. You’ve probably heard the story. While science has been abused by nefarious actors for nefarious purposes — especially under the auspices of incompetent and malevolent government agents — science itself is innocent, free of political content. Science is merely the tried and true method of seeking and finding knowledge. In Richard Feynman’s charming words, it is “an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.” In another version of the same story, science is socially valuable expertise. Despite a few bad apples — fraudulent research, scam journals, or a poorly designed study — science withstands systematic critique and serves the public good. Those who think otherwise are “anti-science.” Turn, for instance, to the mission statement of Science Not Silence, the official blog of the March for Science. The blog aims to “highlight the service role of science and how science supports the common good for all,” to document “political threats to science and its ability to serve,” and to encourage “people to get involved and support science and science-based policymaking.” A different story you may have heard, far less common today but once in wider circulation on the Left, says that science isn’t neutral, free of politics, or by and large a benevolent force for good. This is because all science amounts to one oppressive ideology among many. No science deserves privileging: any science coerces, indoctrinates, or demands religious adherence to its precepts. Such a defeatist perspective as far as truth, knowledge, and technology are concerned carries its own problems. What about the free health clinics organized by the Black Panther Party in the 1970s, which provided desperately needed and effective medical services to those who could neither afford expensive private clinics, nor meet their needs in underfunded and overcrowded public clinics? None of these views of science are attractive to those committed to bringing about institutions of science unlike the ones implicated in the dealings of warfare and capital. After all, none afford a sober, clear-eyed faith in the possibility of a science for the people. Many radical critiques found in previous issues of SftP subvert all three aforementioned views, setting out from the thought that science demands a revolution, and in the wake of a wider revolution, there should still be science. In particular, previous issues of SftP have featured three kinds of radical critique, each of which has challenged a liberal interpretation of science.

Critiquing the Application of Knowledge The first is a radical critique of the applications of scientific knowledge. This kind of critique brings to light the many, often horrifying, ways in which technological and ideological results of knowledge production abet and reinforce ruling-class power, domination, and exploitation of workers and the oppressed. It makes clear the devastating knock-on effects of science on society, such as napalm, nuclear bombs, forced sterilization, hate crimes, unjust social policies, racist criminal risk algorithms, facial recognition scanners at border checkpoints, intersex medical interventions — the list goes on. A 1988 SftP article, “After the Boycott: How Scientists Are Stopping SDI,” shows how a research program created under President Ronald Reagan, officially known as the Strategic Defense Initiative but informally dubbed “Star Wars,” sought to enlist American scientists and engineers in constructing an elaborate network of satellite-based lasers and missiles to defend against a potential nuclear attack on the United States. Here, the author condemned the technological application of physical and chemical research to an irresponsible, massively expensive arms race against the Soviet Union. More recently, an article in the special 2018 issue of SftP, “Geoengineering and Environmental Capitalism,” shows that geoengineering “solutions” to climate change pose grave risks to both the natural and social worlds. While large-scale technological interventions in the climate system, such as those used to militarize the weather during the Vietnam War, have become mainstays of climate policy discourse in the Global North, heralded “solutions” like injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight have the potential to suppress rainfall and interfere with monsoon patterns. Vast plant monocultures to sequester carbon from the atmosphere carry devastating risks for ecosystems. Furthermore, bio-energy production combined with carbon capture and storage is likely to escalate international conflicts by encouraging competition over land and resources, forced displacement, and sharp increases in global food prices. A 1976 SftP article titled “Racist Outbreak at Harvard Medical School” subjects the scientific theory of biological determinism to scrutiny on the basis of its ideological applications. It shows how this theory was harmfully applied to naturalize social injustice: to reinforce the pernicious political belief that social and economic inequities are the fault of individuals being born in the wrong body with the wrong genes. In a racist episode earlier that year, Bernard D. Davis, a professor at Harvard Medical School, published an op-ed in the New England Journal of Medicine attacking minority admissions programs. He warned against “the temptation to award medical diplomas on a charitable basis” to “a person who might leave a swath of unnecessary deaths behind him.” Prior to the publication of this op-ed, Davis had given a public speech in which he’d argued that “social justice must be built around the reality of our genetic diversity.” Here, radical critique of science brought to light the way in which a scientific theory was applied to support white supremacist ideology and dismiss calls for systemic redress of unjust social outcomes.

Critiquing Theory and Methodology A second kind of radical critique challenges the methodological and theoretical frameworks that guide the production of science and technology. One of Science for the People’s most intense campaigns was its fight against the aforementioned theory of biological determinism, notably propounded by Harvard University biologist E. O. Wilson in his influential book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Members of Science for the People like Barbara and Jonathan Beckwith, Steven Chorover, David Culver, Stephen Jay Gould, Ruth Hubbard, Richard Lewontin, and Herb Schreier participated in a widely cited 1975 critique of Wilson’s book, published in the New York Review of Books. This critique consisted of several parts. It criticized Wilson for citing no evidence for the genes he’d posited to exist, such as “conformer genes,” “homosexuality genes,” and “genes favoring spite.” It took him to task for dogmatically assuming that human behavior and social structures are “organs” determined by genes. In addition, it highlighted the absurdity of Wilson’s implicit chain of reasoning: because anthropological genetics is logically conceivable — it could be true despite no evidence that human behavior is determined by genes, and despite that “the very opposite could be true” — there’s a “necessity” for anthropological genetics. We must study the processes of genetic inheritance of culture, it would seem, for no good reason but that such explanations are Wilson’s preference. Furthermore, the critique revealed the sleight-of-hand by which Wilson purported to give evidence for the naturalness of historically specific social structures like slavery and castes. It showed that Wilson had circularly confirmed his own prejudices. He’d read into nonhuman behaviors precisely those social structures he’d hoped to justify. In this example, radical critique comprised critique of a scientific argument: of the concepts, methods, and theories by which conclusions were drawn. Biological determinism was shown not only to be harmful in application, but also, as a theory, to be plagued with gaps — illogical and circular. Likewise, the 2018 SftP critique of geoengineering “solutions” appeals to the fact that the science itself is dubious. It shows that technological schemes to “fix” the climate presuppose linear, simplistic causal models of climate systems despite the fact that such systems, especially on a global scale, are complex, nonlinear, chaotic, and unpredictable. A lot of uncertainty remains as to whether geoengineering “solutions,” tested in silico by incomplete models, are even effective. Models employed in geoengineering research also tend to ignore the social and geopolitical impacts of simulated technologies, perhaps in part because geoengineering is systematically dominated by perspectives from the physical sciences and engineering. Geoengineering “solutions,” then, are not only risky technologies; geoengineering science itself, it’s been argued, is epistemically blinkered.

Critiquing the Basis of Knowledge Production A third kind of radical critique takes as its subject matter the material basis of scientific knowledge production. It emphasizes the causal role that differential access to resources, such as funding, capital power, political power, education, and training, plays in reproducing science and the inequities therein. Sometimes, this causal role takes little work to understand. As the director of the “Star Wars” Office of Innovative Science and Technology (IST) put the point bluntly thirty-five years ago: “People go where the bucks are. There is a lot of money involved here.” Unsurprisingly, oil industry moguls and representatives are at the forefront of developing geoengineering technologies, given that these technologies promise to mitigate anthropogenic climate change without alteration or perturbation to the life of capital. Interest in geoengineering is growing, even outside of fossil fuel producers and extractive industries, because “technofixes” herald opportunities aplenty for profit through promoting market expansion, making commercial gains, and increasing power for economic actors and corporations. At other times, this critique of science requires more effort to unpack and appreciate. “Equality for Women in Science,” an early piece by the SftP editorial board, describes multiple, intricately interacting social and material structures that then, and still today, facilitated the exclusion of women from science. It explains how sorting by sex from an early age made a difference in the trajectories and relative ease of success in scientific careers. Vocational counseling in high schools and colleges, for instance, encouraged women to pursue family roles, clerical work, and professions in the service fields. This decreased the likelihood that women after high school or college would go on to work in science. In addition, women who did manage to complete their science training were made to choose between families and their profession while men in the same fields were not asked to choose. This, then, also decreased the likelihood that women with the same training would advance professionally as far as men. The article ends with a list of economic and institutional demands to “make steps now towards destroying false notions of superiority.” These include equal wages for equal work, a graduate school admissions gender quota, reorientation of vocational counseling, birth control and abortion counseling, parenthood and family sick leave, and free, 24/7 childcare centers. The list reinforces the idea that unequal gender representation in the scientific workforce may be explained not by differences in gender, but by differences in access to resources between the genders. It explains inequity in science by appealing to relevant inequities in the material basis of science.