Science of Revolution: Modern Science and dialectical materialism

[p026] Modern Science and Dialectical materialism By Ralph Martin IN 1914 the continuation of political relations between the various capitalist countries of Europe required the use of ‘other means’. Each of the advanced countries, fighting for a bigger share of the world market, used the most up-to-date machines and factories, the most modern developments of technology, in order more effectively to destroy innumerable towns and cities, lives and ways of life. By the time the war ended, many scientists felt that they had seen enough of the applications of science to ‘real life’; they took up the study of a branch of the subject which they felt to be par- ticularly useless and remote from the needs of industry and war, atomic physics. Robert Jungk describes their way of life in his book, Brighter than a Thousand Suns: professors and lecturers in remote and ancient university towns, collaborating freely with scientists of all other countries, all engaged solely in the disinterested search for the truth. The results of their research were the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. In the history of these weapons and of the men involved in the development of them, traced out in Jungk’s book, their dilemma can be clearly seen. On the one hand, as scientists they have a vast influence on the lives of every person on earth; on the other, however liberal and idealistic they may be (and very often are) as people, they have not the slightest control over the weapons they have invented, nor any power to prevent their use. Scientists almost invariably attempt to resolve dilemmas of this sort by retreating further into the ivory tower of academic research. They see the separation of science from real life as its greatest safeguard, and the necessary condition for its progress. They dislike the way in which the state and the monopolies finance research mainly into fields which are useful to them in industry or nuclear strategy. They see their task as that of increasing our store of knowledge of nature, and leave aside the question of how their work affects the lives of people; and when the nature of the work makes this separation impossible, as happens today with research into atomic energy or automation, they see its application only in an ideal world, in which atomic energy provides unlimited cheap power and automation frees workers from drudgery and adds to their leisure, not in a world in which an atomic bomb destroys Hiroshima, and automation puts. thousands on the. dole. Yet this attempt to reduce science to no more than the search for objective truth has never suc- ceeded. The example of the atomic scientists shows this; and other examples are not hard to find. The way in which the state finances scientific research has already been mentioned; Jungk talks about the extent to which American research is financed by the armed forces (to the extent of $1,500 million in 1957), and quotes the fears of the scientists that ‘the now amicable contracts will tighten up and the fine print will start to contain talk about results and specific weapon problems’. Again, when the American chemicals firm Du Pont developed a pigment which could be used either in paints or as a. textile dye, the directors, not wishing to make their other textile dyes obsolete, spent a large amount of money on developing contaminants which would make the dye suitable for paints but useless for textiles. The case of the drug Thalidomide provides a more recent and tragic example of the uses to which science is put. In these and other ways, capitalism constantly

[p027] 144 uses their work in a way which is quite opposed to most scientists’ ideal of progress; and which they seem quite unable either to understand or to prevent. If we want to understand it we shall have to look at the way in which modern science has developed; because science, and especially the relation of science to society, is not something which is organised and decided upon in the best, or most reasonable, way. Like everything else it is determined historically; and the history of science is not simply a list of discoveries and inventions which were used to get more discoveries and inventions; on the contrary, it is a part of the history of society and its culture which Marx described as a history of class struggles. To say this is not to criticise modern science as ‘bourgeois’ science, and to oppose to it the claims of some illusory ‘socialist’ or ‘proletarian’ science. Most sorts of scientific work to a large extent determine their own methods of observing and experimenting, constructing hypotheses and theories; methods which are based on the experience of many previous workers in the field, and which are departed from only at the risk of confining research in some dogmatic straitjacket. Thus at various times the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union has attempted to force the results of Russian and other scientists into the rigid framework of a scholastic interpretation of LABOUR REVIEW—Winter 1963 Einstein His theory of Relativity was dubbed ‘idealist’ dialectical materialism; rejecting those that did not fit sufficiently well, such as Einstein’s ‘idealist’ Theory of Relativity! On the other hand, these methods contain features which show their origin in the particular way in which science has developed, and which can sometimes act as an obstacle to further development. When this stage is reached, as it perhaps has been today in the physics of so-called ‘elementary particles’, the theory of the basic struc- ture of matter, it becomes useful to attempt to isolate these features, by seeing how they arose in the history of science under capitalism. 1. See, for example, the article ‘Kapitza and the legacy of Stalinism’, in The Newsletter, 22.9.62, p.2. Empiricism Newton Galileo Kepler Practical problems of nascent capitalism underlay their problems The beginnings of modern science lie in the period in which trade and commerce began to play an important part in the economy of feudal Europe, and in which the class of merchants and traders who were to destroy feudalism were growing in power. The practical problems of manufacture and trade, of transport, building roads and canals, of naviga- tion, of mining, lie behind the theoretical problems which Galileo, Kepler and Newton solved;* and the urgent need for solutions to the practical problems explains the rapidity of the development of science at this time. The new science grew up, not with the support of the universities, but in face of their opposition and hostility. The centres of research were scientific societies, such as the Royal Society in London, set up for the purpose. Official science was based on the authorities of holy writ and the works of Aristotle; it solved scientific problems by argument, or by consulting these works, not by experiment. So Galileo, writing to Kepler about the reception given to his new telescope by the local university professors, says: ‘We must smile at the great stupidity of men. What are you to say of the first philosophers of the school here, who with the stubbornness of an adder, despite invitations a thousand times repeated, did not wish even to glance either at the planets or at the moon, or even at the telescope itself. Truly the eyes of these men are closed to the light of truth. It is astounding yet it does not surprise me. This kind of person thinks that philosophy is a kind of book . . that truth has to be sought not in the world, not in nature, but in the collation of texts.’ 2. See ‘The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia’ by B. Hessen (in Science at the Cross Roads, Kniga, 1931).

[p028] MODERN SCIENCE AND DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM Clearly, the new science involved not merely great advances in methods and techniques, but also a completely new way of looking at the world and man’s place in it; a revolution in thought, in fact, accompanying and justifying the revolution in science. The new philosophy removed the creator to a safe distance, invisible, unknowable and without observable consequences, and made the investigation of the world of our senses the province of the scientist, of observation and experiment. It made possible the vast development in science and tech- nology which has transformed what was previously a world of man’s perpetual struggle for existence into a man-made world, hardly any part of which has not been constructed or adapted by man for his own purposes. In a sense, however, the new philosophy, empiri- cism, limited in advance the tasks of science. In rejecting the arbitrary participation of the creator in the day-to-day running of nature, the new scientists had removed what had unified their understanding of nature. They said that all know- ledge of nature came from experience, but what does the experience of the scientists consist off? It consists of observation of all the numerous different kinds of things in the world, and of the lawful, predictable behaviour of some of them. The job of scientists became one of classifying; measuring, and finding the numerical laws suggested by large number of related measurements; setting precise limits to fields of study, and observing the properties of and relationships between the characteristic kinds of things in the small part of nature thus isolated. This process of defining the boundaries of any given science, of finding the laws which have autonomy in that particular science, and neglecting the effects on it of the rest of nature, is the necessary way in which scientific knowledge has been and is being built up. Nevertheless there are some questions which it does not answer. It says nothing about the essential connection between the different branches of science, a connection which arises out of the fact that all the sciences are different ways of understanding one world. It cannot explain why it is possible to understand this world, firstly as a system of electrons, protons, etc., in motion under their mutual interactions, secondly, as various chemical elements, combining according to certain laws, thirdly, as a collection of human beings, living 145 in a class society, and so on. Denying to science the possibility of finding the reasons in the real complexity of nature, empiricism is forced to bring them from outside science—in the form of religion or some more sophisticated variety. of idealism. Newton, for example, opposed the idea that the development of science in any way put in question the responsibility of God for the existence and structure of the natural world. Again, Mach, towards the end of the last century, argued that the subject-matter of science was not the real world but meter-readings, subjective sense-impressions received by the individual brain, and in this way he reduced the enormous variety of natural law to conditions on the way in which these impressions were received, properties of the mind. The scientist is, from this point of view, simply a passive observer, receiving signals from outside and fitting them into a pattern which enables him to predict the results of experiments, but knowing nothing of the connection between his signals and the real processes going on in the world. It becomes impossible for the scientist to say anything about the real nature of matter; and we shall see jater how this works out in the case of modern physics. Science loses its active role, of harnessing the forces of nature in order to transform the world in man’s interest; but it is just the ability to see this active role of science (including social science), in a world seen as a whole, which leads to the view of present society, not as anything permanent or necessarily as it is now, but as a stage in the history of society which must be passed. The dilemma of scientists which we mentioned at the beginning is the result of the lack of this understanding. Without it, even if their research were not restricted, con- trolled or directed in any way, its results can be appropriated by capitalism, just as it appropriates the products of the factory worker. To sum up, the rise of the new science did not lead to an automatic and unlimited development, either for science or for society. Just as the eternal moral principles, the laws of a rational society, laid down by the Enlightenment ended up by providing a justification for the power of the French bour- geoisie, so the history of science from the time of Galileo and Newton up until the present day, has shown it to be science adapted to the needs of capitalism. Modern physics It must be said that very few scientists would agree with the arguments of empiricism taken to their logical conclusion as was done in the last section. The great majority of them would say that they were studying an objectively existing external world, about which their experiments and theories gave them more and more knowledge. Furthermore, the development of science is itself breaking down some of the barriers between the sciences, as for example in biochemistry, which is concerned with the chemistry of living cells. Nevertheless, this automatic materialism of scien-

[p029] 146 tists, which says only that the external world exists and is investigated by science, itself cannot account for the variety of levels of this existence, each with its autonomous laws and corresponding branch of science. Moreover, modern science has its roots, not in this or any other sort of materialism, but in empiricism, and this affects science in several characteristic ways. ‘One of these ways is connected with the fact that most of the laws of science express purely mathe- matical, i.e., quantitative relations. In a way pre- cisely analogous to that in which capitalism abstracts from the differences between the huge variety of qualitatively different products of human labour, and reduces all to a common coin—exchange value or quantity of labour time—so the tendency of every branch of modern science is to fix, once and for all, the kinds of things, the qualities, with which it deals, and to confine itself to discovering numerical relationships between these things, and numerical laws which describe their behaviour. In physics this process has gone much farther that in other sciences. The great advances which physics has made have resulted from a process of constructing models of the world, or of small parts of it, in each of which all the relevant phenomena have been supposed to result from the motion and interaction of a small number of’ different kinds of things. Each model has in turn been discarded and replaced when it has been found to qualitatively over-simplify the real world. Thus it used to be thought that the world was built up of atoms which were small, structureless and indivisible particles. This model was abandoned when it was found that experimental results could be predicted with much greater accuracy if it was supposed that the atom had a structure, and in fact consisted of a nucleus round which electrons described orbits like a minute planetary system. It was then found necessary to suppose that the nucleus itself was built up from more fundamental units. At the moment, about 20 different ‘elementary particles’ are necessary to explain the experimental results. The construction of such models is, of course, the only way in which physics can be developed The physicist’s theories can deal with only a small part of nature, and his knowledge of that part is limited. From a materialist point of view, a good model which predicts accurately the results of experiments also reflects more or less faithfully the actual processes occurring in the real world. The continual construction of such models and, from the contradictions between them and the real world, deriving new ones, is the process in physics of the ‘eternal, endless approximation of thought to the object’. From the point of view of empiricism, however, it is meaningless to say that the processes occurring LABOUR REVIEW—Winter 1963 in the model reflect actual processes going on in nature; the criterion becomes that the model should be the simplest which adequately explains the results of experiments. In practice, furthermore, the current theory is always thought to contain at least the essential features of the ultimate theory of matter. Thus the history of physics is not under- stood as this process of ‘approximation of thought to the object’; instead, to paraphrase Lenin again, ‘the reflection of nature in man’s thought’ is understood ‘lifelessly, abstractly, devoid of movement, without contradictions’ .3 The physics of the fundamental particles of matter will serve to illustrate some of these points. The mathematical theory of these particles is today an extremely complex and difficult subject which seems to have very little connection with what goes on in nature (except that certain quantities which occur have a physical interpretation and allow experimental results to be predicted). More than this, the mathematical formalism is interpreted in such a way that it becomes meaningless to talk of the detailed processes occurring in nature. Let us take the simple example of a single particle moving under the influence of known forces. Until the end of the last century, it was supposed that it was possible in principle to measure, as accurately as one wished, all the dynamical properties of a physical system at any instant (in our simple case these are just the position and velocity of the particle at any instant). Newton’s mechanics provided a method for calculat- ing their values. Modern ‘quantum mechanics’, on the other hand, says that it is impossible to know the values of both position and velocity of the particle simultaneously; the more precisely one knows where the particle is at a given time, the less one can say about how fast it is travelling at the time. In fact the laws of quantum theory give physical information only in the form of ‘probability distributions’ for physical quantities, which provide, in our simple case, no information about the actual values of position and velocity; instead they say that at a given instant, the particle could have any one of a whole range of positions, and give the prob- ability for it being in any one; and similarly for the velocity. These probability distributions for position and velocity are related in such a way that if the particle is almost certain to have one particular position, then its velocity can have any of a very large number of values with practically equal probability, and vice versa. This ‘uncertainty principle’, which Eddington and others thought to be the mechanism through which God had built ‘free will’ into nature, has the con- sequence that it becomes impossible for scientists to attempt to picture or understand the processes going 3. V.1. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, p. 195.

[p030] MODERN SCIENCE AND DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM on in atoms; we have no words to describe such processes. According to Heisenberg, the discoverer of. the principle, ‘It is not surprising that our language should be incapable of describing the pro- cesses occurring within the atoms, for ... it was invented to describe the experiences of daily life, and these consist only of processes involving exceed- ingly large number of atoms.’ The words which physicists use, particle, wave, energy, velocity, position, etc... are thus no more than analogies, which enable them to fit their. experimental and theoretical results into a tidy and familiar scheme; but to push their use too far, to talk at all of the detailed behaviour of elementary particles, is to make statements which ‘do not involve any con- sequences and which therefore have no content at all—in spite of the fact that [they] . . . produce some kind of picture in our imagination ... For- tunately, ‘it has been possible to invent a mathe- matical scheme—the quantum theory—-which seems entirely adequate for the treatment of atomic pro- cesses’.4 The stage of our knowledge of nature represented by quantum theory is here interpreted in a way which illustrates what we have said about the con- sequences of its history for modern science; especi- ally the tendency to understand the qualitative com- plexity of the world in a purely formal, mathematical way (even more explicitly stated by the mathematical physicist Weyl, ‘. . . the constructive mathematical method of our modern physics, which repudiates qualities . . .’)> 4. W. Heisenberg, The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory, University of Chicago Press, 1930. 5. H. Weyl, Space, Time, Matter, London, 1922. . 147 This tendency is opposed by some modern physi- cists, in particular by D. Bohm, who attempts. to interpret quantum theory from the point of view of a consistent materialism. Starting from the ‘quali- tative infinity’ of nature, the unlimited number of different kinds of things in the world, he concludes that there cannot be any final theory of matter which accounts for all its properties in a purely mathe- matical way. Any such theory leaves out of account the properties of matter, its special laws, on funda- mental levels of its existence as yet unknown; and in fact represents, whether or not it is understood in this way, a theoretical model of nature built on our present level of understanding of its qualities. The ‘elementary’ particles must themselves be thought of as complex structures, made up of more fundamental elements whose behaviour is governed by new laws. Then, in the same way as the motion of a single molecule of a gas appears to the human observer to be erratic and random (although pre- dictable in terms of its own laws), so to an atomic scale ‘observer’ the behaviour of these more funda- mental elements would seem to be erratic and random. And, just as the actual behaviour of large volumes of gas can be understood as the outcome of the random motions of large numbers of molecules, so it might be expected that the laws of the atomic level could be understood in terms of the random and ‘unpredictable’ behaviour on the sub-atomic level. In fact, Bohm has described in detail one way in which the ‘probability’ laws of quantum theory could arise out of the random effect on the atomic level of the motion on the sub-atomic level. 6. D. Bohm, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics. . Conclusion . In this article I have tried to show that modern science is, with the rest of modern culture, a part of the ‘superstructure’ of capitalist society. Many of its characteristic features have their origin in the revolution in thought which accompanied and justified the bourgeois revolution. Scientists, of course, study an objective external world whose properties are independent of the economy, and which determines to a large extent their methods and results. For this reason, the connection between the superstructure and the ‘economic base’ is probably even less mechanical and more complex for science than it is for other parts of this culture. Perhaps it may be useful, nevertheless, to compare the situation of scientists in capitalist society with that of the writers whom Georg Lukacs has considered in his recently translated book on the historical novel? Lukacs’ theme is, very briefly, the new under- standing of history shown by the great writers of the period of the bourgeois revolution in Europe, and the decline of this understanding after 1848, during the consolidation of bourgeois rule and, subse- quently, of the growth of imperialism. Authors such as Scott derived from the revolutionary reorgani- sation of society which was taking place in their own time a clearer picture of change in history. They saw the progressive and reactionary forces which were peculiar to the past societies and communities 7. G, Lukacs, The Historical Novel, Merlin Press, London, 1962.

[p031] 148 Georg Lukacs Explains the loss of historicai consciousness and sense of which they wrote and which worked to change them (and which through such changes, connected them with the present). Because of this connection, history for them was real and knowable. We see here, from a different angle, the new consciousness of man’s power to control nature of which we talked earlier: for the scientist of the bourgeois revolution, conscious of his power to harness the forces of nature for his own use; for the great novelist, con- sciousness of his ability to make his own history. As the bourgeoisie lost its revolutionary aims, so this consciousness .and historical sense were lost. History no longer leads up to and explains the modern world; instead the historical themes treated present a world which is remote, exotic, unconnected with today. The forces which change the world are unknown and unknowable; they reveal them- selves only as the subjective wishes of great men. Dealing with the important writers of this period, Lukacs is not at all concerned to represent them as dupes or tools of the capitalist class. On the con- trary, in many cases he shows their work to be the result of a disgust with bourgeois society; but their rejection of it is itself conditioned by that society. They escaped into history, as providing a world more rewarding or exciting than the actual one. The former understanding arose when a revolutionary class showed in practice how it was possible for men to change the world; unable to recognise and accept the historical role of the proletariat after the bour- geois revolution, the later writers were unable to see for themselves the possibility of change. Con- sequently they saw in history only the difference from, not the connection with, the present. In the same way, the materialism of many of the earlier scientists turned into the idealism of LABOUR REVIEW—Winter 1963 Mach and Eddington. As the ruling class was less able to use the results of science in the interests of men, so scientists became less and less confident of their ability to control nature, of the understanding of nature which their science gave them. The development of the historical. novel, from an important way of understanding society and the way in which it changes, into a particular brand of escapism like the detective novel or science-fiction, is therefore closely paralleled by the development of science, which changed from the search for ways to harness nature into an academic pursuit, science for its own sake, independent of the uses to which it is put. Neither makes any statement about the nature of society or of the natural world, whose workings remain unknowable. Both are the typical products of the period of capitalist rule. Like the novelists with whom Lukacs deals, scientists also have been led to reject bourgeois society’s way of using their work; especially, in their case, during the present century, in which imperial- ism has employed nearly all the great achievements of science in destroying, expropriating or exploiting the mass of the population of the world. Again, this rejection is limited by the position of scientists in this society, and by their partial, one-sided view of the world, which we considered earlier. As imperialism increases the gulf which separates the progressive possibilities inherent in science from the uses to which it is put, so it accelerates the negative, idealistic tendency of empiricism. The increasingly obvious inability of scientists to control nature in practice is reflected in their growing belief that their science provides only a shorthand description of an unknowable ‘outside world’ as it affects their instru- ments and meters. Scientists, too, understand the possibility of great changes in nature and society only when this possi- bility is demonstrated by a revolutionary class which, in taking power, alters the whole economic, cuitural and scientific organisation of society, giving them new freedom and setting them new tasks. Their present fragmented, compartmentalised science can- not itself arrive at consciousness of the possibility and the source of change in a society which seems to them permanent and static. This is provided, not by any impartial and objective analysis of laws and trends in nature and society, but by the under- standing that the interests of science and scientists are those of the working class in the capitalist wortd, and only to the extent that this class successfuliy fights for a socialist society is any future progress guaranteed.

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