Socialist scientists

[Spartacist]

Hey, can anybody here give me a list of some really accomplished socialist/Marxist scientists? Particularly if they have impressive credentials or have won awards for their work.

Thanks.

[Whitten]

Albert Einstein comes to mind immediatly.

[Angry Young Man]

Diesel. Gagarin, anyone? No he's not that famous, is he?

[bloody_capitalist_sham]

Jonh Maynard Smith (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Smith)

He's like a top dog.

And although he's a socialist, he stopped being a Marxist because of Dialectical Materialism.

[Spartacist]

What i should have said was prominant socialist, Marxist scientists who are around today.

[Janus]

ComradeRed! :P

I know Stephen J. Gould certainly sympathized with socialism and admired Marx's materialist method but never declared himself to be an ardent Marxist.

Perhaps this might help?
Soviet scientists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Soviet_scientists)

[bezdomni]

Tesla was pretty far left, I've heard.

[Cult of Reason]

Kropotkin?

[ComradeRed]

Just ask any String theorist, like Lubos Motl (http://motls.blogspot.com/) :lol:

[bezdomni]

Jean-Pierre Vigier. French theoretical physicist and Marxist.

[Dr Mindbender]

Originally posted by [email protected] 03, 2007 05:10 pm
Hey, can anybody here give me a list of some really accomplished socialist/Marxist scientists? Particularly if they have impressive credentials or have won awards for their work.

Thanks.
Marx was also a mathematician in his spare time. Fact.

[Dr Mindbender]

Originally posted by [email protected] 04, 2007 08:56 pm
ComradeRed! :P

I know Stephen J. Gould certainly sympathized with socialism and admired Marx's materialist method but never declared himself to be an ardent Marxist.

Perhaps this might help?
Soviet scientists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Soviet_scientists)
When you say 'Soviet scientists' do you mean scientists who were Soviet nationals? I think he means scientists who were actual, politically active communists/socialists.

[MarxSchmarx]

Richard Levins, among the founders of modern ecology, and Richard Lewontin, a great geneticist. Both at Harvard in the USA. Marxist to the core. (http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LEVDIX.html)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

US:


Marx was also a mathematician in his spare time. Fact.

He was not well versed in mathematics (he relied on books that were badly out of date even in his day -- he knew nothing of the path-breaking work of Cauchy (1789-1857), or that of Weierstrass (1815-1897), and was a decided amateur (but I am sure he could have mastered the subject). His lengthy comments on the calculus, by the way, are worthless.

I am sorry to say, Engels was even worse (in fact far worse):

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/Heijenoort.htm

As MarxSchmarx says, the most famous living Marxist scientist is Richard Lewontin.

Another who comes to mind is Steven Rose:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Rose

[Hit The North]

Rosa,

just out of interest, what is your opinion of these Marxist scientists, Rose and Levins?

[Hit The North]

Comrade Red,

out if interest, how does your Marxism impact on your work as a scientist?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Z, I am not qualified to judge their scientific work (but they strike me as excellent comrades), but when they stray into areas of philosophy, they make little sense.

[JimFar]

Great Britain in the past featured a number of Marxist scientists, including some who were very eminent in their fields. Some names that come to mind include the crystallographer, J.D. Bernal, the geneticist and evolutionary theorist, J.B.S. Haldane, the embryologist and science historian, Joseph Needham, and the biologist and mathematician, Lancelot Hogben. Gary Werskey in his book, The Visible College gave a lucid account of these scientists who were most prominent between the 1930s and 1970s.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Right Jim, and I would have mentioned these too, but the questioner specifically wanted examples of living scientists.

[Janus]

When you say 'Soviet scientists' do you mean scientists who were Soviet nationals?
Obviously not every Soviet was necessarily a socialist but political ideology permeated all corridors of life in the USSR including science (many scientists were members of the Communist Party, science majors were forced to take dialectics classes,etc.).

[JimFar]

If you're interested in Soviet scientists, a good place to start is with Harvard/MIT Professor Loren Graham's book, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union. Concerning the second, 1987, edition of that book, I once wrote of it that his book on science and philosophy in the former Soviet Union was noteworthy for the scope of its coverage of work done in the natural sciences and the philosophy of science there. Professor Graham provides an almost encyclopedic coverage of many different scientific disciplines including physics (with discussions on relativity, quantum mechanics and cosmology), biology (encompassing genetics, physiology, evolutionary biology), psychology, computer science and cybernetics.

He relates Soviet debates in those different disciplines to arguments over dialectical materialism. He points out while a lot of Soviet writing on Marxism and dialectical materialism was pure hackery, a lot of highly talented scientists, philosophers, and other scholars in the Soviet Union took dialectical materialism quite seriously and they wrote some significant works on the philosophy of science from a dialectical materialist perspective.

While in Stalin's time, it was almost mandatory for scientists to include in their writings genuflections to Marx, Lenin, and Comrade Stalin to ensure state support for their work, this was generally not true after Stalin's time and it was quite possible for scientists to go about their work without bothering themselves over Marxism or dialectical materialism, just as most Western scientists don't like to bother themselves over philosophical or political issues. Nevertheless, Graham points out many eminent scientists and scholars continued to write on dialectical materialism and attempt to show how that system of thought could help to illuminate issues in their own disciplines. In other words they continued to take dialectical materialism seriously as a philosophy even when it was not mandatory for them to bother with it as a means for winning support for their work.

Graham in discussing the Soviet dialectical materialists of the 1970s and 1980s, distinguishes between two schools or tendencies: the "ontologists" and the "epistemologists." The latter was a tendency that emerged in the post-Stalin era which attempted to draw clear distinctions between scientific issues and philosophical issues. In effect, they were attempting to elaborate Marxist and dialectical materialist defenses of the autonomy of scientific disciplines in order to curb the sort of state interference and censorship that was characteristic of the Stalin era. These philosophers and scientists argued that the proper concern of the philosophy of science was with issues of epistemology, logic, scientific methodology, and cognition. In their view, it was not the place for dialectical materialism as a world view to pronounce on scientific issues like what was the best theory of the origins of the cosmos, or what was the best theory of heredity. Those were issues that were best left to researchers in the appropriate disciplines, rather than to dialectical materialist philosophers. The attempt to link Marxism to specific theories concerning these issues was in their view bad both for science and for Marxism.

The "epistemologists" seem to have been more open to influences from the West. Thus, the philosopher Engels Matveevich Chudinov (yes, he was named after Marx's sidekick), attempted in his writings to work out a sophisticated Marxist epistemology which would take into account the work of such Western philosophers as Rescher, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Russell, Carnap, Quine and Godel amongst others.

Igor Naletov's work Alternatives to Positivism (http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/naletov0.html) (Naletov is not mentioned at all by Graham) seems to have been written from a similar perspective.

The "ontologists" clung to a more traditional understanding of dialectical materialism in which diamat was seen as "the most general science of nature and society." For these dialectical materialists, the dialectics of nature was thought to be of critical importance. They argued that there were dialectical laws that could be seen as operating at all levels of the organization of matter in the inorganic and organic nature that is studied by chemists, physicists, and biologists. And these dialectical laws can also be seen as operating at the levels of the human psyche and human society.

In this book, Professor Graham delineates the shifts in the influence of these two schools within the former Soviet Union during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. As he saw it, for a number of years, the "epistemologists" were gaining influence within Soviet academic circles, especially as older philosophers and scientists from the Stalin era began to retire or die off. However, by the early 1980s the "ontologists" began to regain some lost ground with the emergence of a new generation of scholars who sought to breathe new life into more traditional forms of diamat. Graham points out that the "ontologists" benefited from the fact that their formulations of dialectical materialism were closer to the simplified formulations that were taught in most Soviet schools and institutions of higher education. He suggests that by the mid-1980s the debate between the "epistemologists" and the "ontologists" was winding down.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thanks for that Jim, but it looks like the 'ruling ideas' of the ruling class in Russia ruled the minds of its scientists, too.

You will perhaps note the spilt mentality of such guys.

In their professional work (in Biology, Physics, Geology, Chemistry, etc.,), the level of detail and precision required to establish even small changes in genuine science is quite daunting -- as you will know!

In dialectical materialism, by way of contrast, secondary data --, and not much of it --, anecdotal, quaint and hackneyed examples are used and over used.

Such scientists seem to accept evidence and analysis that they'd fail a first year undergraduate for producing in a term paper!

That alone suggests somthing else at work other than genuine scientific opinion.

[The book you kindly linked too merely seems to confirm this.]

Compare this to the time just after the revolution (when there was no need of such quasi-religious consolation) -- as Wetter, Joravsky and a host of others attest, the dominant mood among the Bolsheviks was to adandon philosophy in its entirety as a bourgeois thought form.

And quite right too (except, philosophy predates capitalism -- it is a ruling-class thought form).

[JimFar]

Rosa wrote:


Compare this to the time just after the revolution (when there was no need of such quasi-religious consolation) -- as Wetter, Joravsky and a host of others attest, the dominant mood among the Bolsheviks was to adandon philosophy in its entirety as a bourgeois thought form.

Well as I understand it much of this anti-philosophical mood took the form of what was called "mechanism" in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. In fact the 1920s saw a vigorous debate over philosophy that took the form of a clash between "mechanists" and "dialecticians."

This debate at first began as a discussion within the philosophy of science but over time came to encompass most aspects of philosophy. Furthermore, despite the fact it was formally settled in 1929, the issues underlying the debate never went away, and recurred in different forms over time. Indeed, since the issues at hand were among the most important ones concerning Marxist philosophy, they in fact have never really went away.

By the early 1920s Soviet philosophers were debating what conception of materialism provided the best philosophical basis for Marxism. One school held that a mechanistic conception of materialism was acceptable. Most of the advocates of this view either came straight out of the natural sciences, or they were philosophers
who had been closely associated with natural science in some way. Among the leading advocates of this school were A.K. Timartizev, Timianski, Akselrod, and Stepanov.

These people were staunch empiricists. They did not deny the validity of dialectics but maintained that dialectics must limit itself to what was observable and verifiable
by the methods of natural science. Dialectics must follow science, and not pretend to be able to lead it. Materialism for these people meat a strict and thorough reliance upon the methods and findings of the natural sciences. These philosophers embraced the label of "mechanists" as a designation for their school of thought, and they insisted that a mechanistic outlook was valid not only for the natural sciences but also for the philosophy of history and of society as well. For these people, a Marxist philosophy therefore had to root itself in the natural sciences and to follow the findings of natural science. In their view, it was illegitimate to posit a Marxist philosophy that would attempt to dictate to the sciences.

Closely allied to the mechanists, though not entirely agreeing with them was the prominent Bolshevik, N.I. Bukharin. Thus Bukharin in his Historical Materialism (http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1921/histmat/index.htm) embraced a positivist interpretation of Marx's materialist conception of history, emphasizing that the goal was to develop causal explanations of history, which would take the place of teleological explanations. Furthermore, Bukharin argued that "It is quite possible to transcribe the 'mystical' (as Marx put it)
language of Hegelian dialectics into the language of modern mechanics." Bukharin thus maintained that Marx's materialist conception of history should over time lead to the development of a positive science of society that would be mechanistic in character and in which the concept of equilibrium would play a central role.

The mechanists maintained that the dialectical conception of nature, properly understood, was the mechanist conception. Indeed, Stepanov once wrote an article bearing the title "The Dialectical Understanding of Nature is the Mechanistic Understanding" in case anyone should be confused about what his position was.

As the mechanists saw it, Soviet philosophy was torn by a debate between those
who maintained that dialectical method was one to be used insomuch as it was fruitful
for revealing new facts about nature and society, versus those who looked to the
dialectical philosophy of Hegel to provide themselves with ready-made solutions to
problems. The mechanists charged their opponents (i.e. the dialecticians) with offering a priori solutions to problems in the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of history.

Opposing the mechanists were the so-called dialecticians or Deborinists. These people had a much higher regard for Hegel than did the mechanists. Furthermore, they maintained that the mechanists misunderstood how Marx & Engels had reconstructed Hegelian dialectics on a materialist basis. Th dialecticians were vigorous defenders of what Marxists call the "dialectics of nature." They maintain that the laws of dialectics as described by Engelsin such works as Anti-Duhring and The Dialectics of Nature are actually found in nature. Dialectics reflects the natural world. The dialecticians argued that the mechanists were positing a narrow, rigid, and lifeless conception of nature. Whereas, the mechanists tended to be either natural scientists or philosophers close to the natural sciences, the dialecticians tended to be professional philosophers with a strong background in Hegelian philosophy. The leading dialectician was the philosopher Deborin, who had been a protoge of Plekhanov (the "father of Russian Marxism"). Like, his mentor, Deborin had been, prior to the October Revolution, a Menshevik.

Deborin and his followers hit hard against the mechanists, arguing that their conception of science could not adequately make sense out of the new developments in physics like relativity and quantum mechanics, nor was mechanism, in their opinion adequate for making sense out of the then latest developments in biology. The dialecticians attacked the positivism of the mechanist school which they saw as naive and mistaken. They as I already pointed out venerated Hegel, in contrast to the disdain that most of the mechanists had for him. They held that Marxism could not be adequately understood except in reference to Hegel and Hegelianism. While the mechanists on the other hand held that Marx had superseded Hegel and Hegelianism. For them the Deborinists constituted a regression back to an idealist metaphysics that Marx had transcended.

Besides disagreeing about Hegel, the two schools generally had quite different opinions concerning the meaning and importance of Spinoza's philosophy. The mechanists tended to dismiss Spinoza as an idealist metaphysician. While Deborin followed his mentor Plekhanov in holding Spinoza to have been a materialist and a dialectician. For Deborin as for Plekhanov, dialectical materialism is a kind of Spinozism. On the other hand, it should be noted that among the mechanists, Akselrod did hold a high opinion of Spinoza. Unlike most of the other mechanists, she was trained as a professional philosopher, and indeed like her opponent, Deborin, she had been a protoge of Plekhanov. She once wrote a paper, "Spinoza and Materialism," in which she followed her mentor, Plekhanov, in presenting Spinoza as a precursor of Marx but she gave special emphasis to Spinoza's determinism, his critique of teleology and his mechanism. In other words, she presented Spinoza as being, himself, a kind of mechanist.

The debate between the mechanists and the dialecticians heated up in the late 1920s, finally coming to a head in 1929 at a meeting of the Second All-Union Conference of Marxist-Leninist Scientific Institutions where all the leading figures from both sides of the debate appeared. Deborin gave the leading report, and a resolution was passed which condemned mechanism. The mechanists were condemned as undermining dialectical materialism, and charged with trying to substitute a vulgar evolutionism for
materialist dialectics, and positivism for materialism.

However, the victory of the Deborinists proved to be short-lived, since the following year controversy broke out over the issue of "idealism" and of "menshevising idealism." Essentially what happened was that Stalin had concluded that while the Deborinists had made valid criticisms of mechanism, they had gone too far in pushing the stick towards a Hegelian idealism. The application of the term "menshevizing idealism" was a reference to Deborin's past support for the Mensheviks over the Bolsheviks. Thus, he was being accused of not just being an idealist but of being a "menshevizing idealist" which was presumably a lot worse. Stalin moved to settle the debate between the mechanists and the Dialecticians by fiat. The critique of Deborin was pressed forward by two young philosophers, Mitin and Yudin who linked the alleged failings of Deborin to those of his mentor Plekhanov. Deborin was accused of divorcing theory from practice. His philosophy was said to be of little use for advancing forward Stalin's Five Year Plan with its breakwith NEP. Mitin in particular argued that both the Deborinists and the mechanists had failed to grasp
the dialectics underlying the transition from NEP to socialism. Thus both schools were charged with promoting a divorce between theory and practice. The new view, what cam be to be known as the "new turn" was promoted by Mitin (with Stalin's backing) attempted to split the difference between the two schools. Dialectical materialism
affirmed an ontological materialism as advocated by the mechanists. But the validity of the dialectics of nature (which the Deborinists had placed great emphasis on) was also affirmed as well. At a Party conference this critique of the two schools was officially adopted and Deborin made a show of support for Mitin.

Deborin and just a handful of other Soviet philosophers had the fortune of surviving
the great purges of the 1930s. Akselrod of the mechanist school also survived while
numerous other people from both schools disappeared into the gulags and were never heard from again.

This new view provided the basis for Stalin's codification of dialectical materialism as
presented in his History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks) (http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/HCPSU39NB.html) which became official dogma for all Communists.

[JimFar]

BTW for those who are interested, an English translation of Akselrod's paper, "Spinoza and Materialism," can be downloaded from http://www.sovlit.org/lia/Texts/LIA_Spinoza1925.pdf

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Jim, thanks for spending all that time helping the younger comrades here become aware of this period in our history (and the monumental waste of time and talent this involved):


Well as I understand it much of this anti-philosophical mood took the form of what was called "mechanism" in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. In fact the 1920s saw a vigorous debate over philosophy that took the form of a clash between "mechanists" and "dialecticians."

Right! Sure those materialists were 'crude', but certainly on the right lines, arguing that all philosophy was useless.


This debate at first began as a discussion within the philosophy of science but over time came to encompass most aspects of philosophy. Furthermore, despite the fact it was formally settled in 1929, the issues underlying the debate never went away, and recurred in different forms over time. Indeed, since the issues at hand were among the most important ones concerning Marxist philosophy, they in fact have never really went away.

Well, it was 'settled' bureaucratically in 1929, not intellectually.

The Hegelians were promoted in order to allow Stalin to defeat those who opposed his attack on the peasants (aka 'Kulaks'), and gained ascendancy after the defeat of the German revolution, and particularly after the defeat of the Chinese revolution (reflecting once again Lenin's point that Marxists will turn toward the mystical in periods of defeat). They thus held all the relevant positions of power and were able to shut the materialists out. When those Deborinite fools had served their purpose, they were dropped.

And, it was no coincidence that the works of Engels you mention were 'rediscovered' at this time.

As I noted, the ruling ideas always turn out to be those of the ruling class: a priori dogmatics.