is capialism the best for science?

[lostsoul]

I know a few Cancer researchers, and i noticed that they are supported by many medical corprations that are trying to be the first to get the cure. Because if they get the cure first they can get the rights to it and sell it all over the world.

Selling cures for Cancer and sickness's is pretty low if its just to make a profit, but the money is still an insentive to reach that goal first.

In a communist society, if everyone is equal, why would someone try to find cures for sickness's?

MY QUESTION:
Can communism do the same in regrades to science? or is capialism the only way?


Thanks in advance.

[SonofRage]

Capitalism can sometimes hurt science. Drug companies would rather produce a drug that will be an ongoing treatment than a cure that would take a source of income away from them.

[synthesis]

Very true SonofRage, the pharmaceutical corporations have a relative cure for AIDS but refuse to release it because it's much more profitable to just keep people on the dole.

[thursday night]

Socialist societies can make huge scientific/technological advances because a) wealth is centralized and B) the state can directly organize research, plus research is done for the sake of curing diseases and improving the quality of the medical system rather than just to make a profit. And SonofRage makes an excellent point; private medical systems and/or companies have been known to cut corners just to save (or make) a buck. So all in all, socialism is better for science just as it is better for everything else.

[lostsoul]

Quote: from thursday night on 3:31 am on Feb. 11, 2003
Socialist societies can make huge scientific/technological advances because a) wealth is centralized and B) the state can directly organize research, plus research is done for the sake of curing diseases and improving the quality of the medical system rather than just to make a profit. And SonofRage makes an excellent point; private medical systems and/or companies have been known to cut corners just to save (or make) a buck. So all in all, socialism is better for science just as it is better for everything else.

i kind of understand the moral benfits of it. But do you think that it will work in practice? It seems many of the research is in an attempt to make huge profits, if that is taken away, is it possible to see the same gains? I mean the motives in socialism are far better then capialists, but are the results better too?

It seems communism is the answer to fight poverty but can it fight sickness as well? both are equally injustices.

[SonofRage]

Cuba has *excellent* healthcare.

[thursday night]

"Cuba has *excellent* healthcare."

Very true. Havana alone has about thirty hospitals in it alone. Furthermore, some people pay large sums of money just to get treatment in Cuba.

[ID2002]

Damn rights! Cuba has an excellent health care system with Canadian doctors who go down an help out once every few years. It is a true test of socialised healthcare, which works! Also the education system is very decent. I wished more countries would learn from Cuba.

[Smoking Frog II]

Has anyone played Civ 2?

That's pretty accurate with government types.

I always play the mayans

[lostsoul]

comrades, i think i didn't make it very clear, my question was in regrades to scienctific acviements(medical or non-medical).

I was wondering how communism deals with it? Can it deal with it better then capialism?


Thanks for all your help.

[Capitalist Imperial]

Quote: from lostsoul on 4:05 pm on Feb. 11, 2003
comrades, i think i didn't make it very clear, my question was in regrades to scienctific acviements(medical or non-medical).

I was wondering how communism deals with it? Can it deal with it better then capialism?


Thanks for all your help.

History suggests that capitalist countries are much more scientifically capable than socialist nations, period.

Case in point: The USA is the most technologically and scientifically advanced nation on earth.

[Tkinter1]

It all depens on how you're motivated.

If you're motivated by self achievment, then the system in place wouldn't matter. Since most people don't work, just for achievment(they want money), Capitalism is probably the better choice to motivate people and thus excel further in scientific research.

[thursday night]

"The USA is the most technologically and scientifically advanced nation on earth."

The Soviet Union was highly advanced until it collapsed, and I'd say it was on par with America for the latter part of the last century. Furthermore, the People's Republic of China, despite it's recent revisionist policies, has recently made major advances.

[honest intellectual]

lostsoul, co-operation is more effective than competition, that should be clear. Which is more effective, five different corporations researching the same thing, or all of them working together, refsing to share their knowledge and resources? Under capitalism, you have different workers doing the same research at the same time. In other words, the same research is done several times over! This is a tremendous waste of resources and skilled labour

[Invader Zim]

Surely you could operate a system where the company or group of scientists working on the cure could be rewarded, even in a communist socioty.

[peaccenicked]

from www.screwschool.com/term/pol44.htm+Grundrisse+science+head&hl=en&ie=UTF-8]google (http://216.239.57.100/custom?q=cache:vbxhmXbJh0gC:[url) cache[/url]
MARXISM AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

The main thing to be said about Marxism and the history of science is that more, much more, has been written that is explicitly or implicitly anti-Marxist than has been written which is avowedly an attempt to see the history of science in Marxist terms. Another class of writings can be seen as watered-down Marxism, while still another is silent about Marxism but does not make much sense unless one knows that Marxism is the silent partner in a one-voice dialogue or polemic in which the other position is not named. The analogy which springs to mind is that of a planet which is not seen but is inferred because of the perturbations of the other planets due to the gravitational effect of the unseen one. The defining feature of Marxist approaches to the history of science is that the history of scientific ideas, of research priorities, of concepts of nature and of the parameters of discoveries are all rooted in historical forces which are, in the last instance, socio-economic. There are variations in how literally this is taken and various Marxist-inspired and Marxist-related positions define the interrelations among science and other historical forces more or less loosely. There is a continuum of positions. The most orthodox provides one-to-one correlations between the socio-economic base and the intellectual superstructure. This is referred to as economism or vulgar Marxism. The classical source is a set of comments in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):



My enquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term "civil society"; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy.... The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies can be summarised as follows. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arise a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness... The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation and the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.[1]

The attentive reader will notice that science is here distinguished from ideology, but all versions of Marxist history of science generalise the position take here about intellectual life and treat science as lying within the historical force described by Marx in this passage, which is of fundamental importance to Marxist historiography.

Next to economism is the theory of mediation, according to which there are various degrees of relative autonomy, elasticity, lag and room for contradictions. There is ample warrant for this in the writings of Marx and Engels. For example, Engels wrote to Bloch in 1890:



According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimate determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible) the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.[2]

All of this falls within the general framework which asserts that:



The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expressions of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore the ideas of its dominance.[3]

Marx stresses the historicity of all concepts throughout his writings, for example, in the Grundrisse:



This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity — precisely because of their abstractness — for all epochs, are nevertheless in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations.... In the succession of the economic categories, as in any other historical, social science, it must not be forgotten that their subject — here, modern bourgeois society — is always what is given, in the head as well as in reality, and that these categories therefore express the forms of being, the characteristics of existence, and often only individual sides of this specific society, this subject, and that therefore this society by no means begins only at the point where one can speak of it as such; this holds for science as well.[4]

To summarise the less rigid form of Marxist approaches to the history of science which fall within the domain of mediation theory, one should begin with the concept of labour and the labour process as the key to human history. History or historicity is, in turn, the key to everything: 'We know only a single Science, the science of history'.[5] The net effect of this approach is to broaden and deepen one's perspective: to root explanations in labour and the labour process, to treat concepts historically, to investigate connections and articulations as fully as possible and constantly to bear in mind that the arrow of causality moves from being to consciousness. This means that a number of distinctions on which the false self-consciousness of science depends are seen as permeable and interactive, for example, the distinctions between fact and value, substance and context, science and society, the context of origination and the context of justification. If one connects these perspectives to recent developments in the philosophy of science, a useful simplification would be to say that all facts are theory-laden, all theories are value-laden, and all values are derived from world-views or ideologies which permeate and constitute what count as facts, theories, priorities and acceptable scientific discoveries. A further consequence is that the sharp distinction between science and technology vanishes. All is mediation — mediation of social and economic forces involved in the production and reproduction of real life. Science is inside society, inside history.

At the extreme of the position I have described as the theory of mediation lies structuralist Marxism with its concept of immanent or structural causality in which the formal features of an intellectual sphere correspond to formal features of the base, but in the most arcane writings of the structuralist Marxists, the lonely moment of the last instance never comes. My own experience of the trajectories of structuralist Marxist writers is that they eventually find themselves moving into the New Right and are therefore not a reliable guide to this point of view.

At the outermost extreme of Marxist historiography lies the point of view of totality. The entire effort of Marxist writings in this tradition is to transcend the attempt to treat science in isolation from society. Science was seen as 'incapable of grasping reality as a totality'.[6] At the extreme, the theory of totality argues that all aspects of reality are interconnected with and reflect all others. This is a point of view rather akin to Leibniz's monadology and it runs the risk of losing the directionality of causality from base to superstructure which is the bedrock or axiom of Marxist explanation. On the other hand, the point of view of totality insists on embedding ideas in society. As Lukács wrote,



For the Marxist as an historical dialectician both nature and all the forms in which it is mastered in theory and practice are social categories; and to believe that one can detect anything supra-historical or supra-social in this context is to disqualify oneself as a Marxist.[7]

The appearance of Marxist history of science in the Anglo-American literature can be linked to a single catalytic event: the surprise appearance of a Soviet delegation at The Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in London in 1931. The delegation was headed by Nikolai Bukharin, Lenin's favourite, who was still years away from his own dramatic purge trial. Another contributor to the volume of their essays, Science at the Cross Roads, was N. I. Vavilov, an eminent plant breeder who died of persecution a decade later, while among the others, E. Colman survived and slipped into Finland decades later. Far and away the single most important document in the Marxist historiography of science is the essay from that volume, 'The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's "Principia"' by Boris Hessen. This is the locus classicus of the base-superstructure approach to the history of science, using the greatest work of modern science's most revered hero as its case study. Hessen argued that each of Newton's main theoretical preoccupations could be rooted directly and unambiguously in technical issues in his historical setting. He began by reviewing Marx's views from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (quoted above). The following sentence appears in bold: 'The method of production of material existence conditions the social, political and intellectual process of the life of society'.[8] Moving on to Lenin, he claims that Marxism eliminates two main defects in previous historical writing:



Previous historical theories considered only the intellectual motives of the historical activity of people as such. Consequently they could not reveal the true roots of those motives, and consequently history was justified by the individual intellectual impulse of human beings. Thus the road was closed to any recognition of the objective laws of the historical process. "Opinion governed the world." The course of history depended on the talents and the personal impulses of man. Personality was the creator of history... The second defect which Marx's theory eliminates is that the subject of history is not the mass of the population, but the personalities of genius. The most obvious representative of this view is Carlyle — for whom history was the story of great men... The ideas of the ruling class in every historical period are the ruling ideas, and the ruling class distinguishes its ideas from all previous ideas by putting them forward as eternal truths. It wishes to reign eternally and bases the inviolability of its rule on the eternal quality of its ideas.[9]

He then traces the economics, physics and technology of the period of the English Civil War and the Commonwealth and dwells on communications, water transport, industry (especially mining) and war (including division of labour, army and armaments, and ballistics). He then concludes:



If we compare this basic series of themes with the physical problems which we found when analysing the technical demands of transport, means of communication, industry and war, it becomes quite clear that these problems of physics were fundamentally determined by these demands... We have compared the main technical and physical problems of the period with the scheme of investigations governing physics during the period we are investigating, and we come to the conclusion that the scheme of physics was mainly determined by the economic and technical tasks which the rising bourgeoisie raised to the forefront.[10}

Moving on, he says,



We cite all these facts in opposition to the tradition which has been built up in literature, which represents Newton as an Olympian standing high above all the ’earthly’ technical and economic interests of his time, and soaring only in the empyrean of abstract thought.[11]




(Edited by peaccenicked at 7:56 pm on Feb. 11, 2003)

[Sirion]

On scientific progress, socialism by far outworks capitalism. Why? Becase the technology is available to everyone. In socialism, rewarding will be done through money support from the state, under communism , humnity is likely to have come to such a point that it is unnecesarry.

Why would anyone then? Well, even if we get an utopia on earth, people will not stop dying. To help people (especially relatives) to live longer would be a motivator. All of us have a desire to help (capitalism supresses it). And, of course, we all need a job. If you have studied medicine or any similiar subject, it could be a natural thing to work on.

[Invader Zim]

Quote: from Sirion on 7:52 pm on Feb. 11, 2003
On scientific progress, socialism by far outworks capitalism. Why? Becase the technology is available to everyone. In socialism, rewarding will be done through money support from the state, under communism , humnity is likely to have come to such a point that it is unnecesarry.

Why would anyone then? Well, even if we get an utopia on earth, people will not stop dying. To help people (especially relatives) to live longer would be a motivator. All of us have a desire to help (capitalism supresses it). And, of course, we all need a job. If you have studied medicine or any similiar subject, it could be a natural thing to work on.


I disagree most of the scientific increase has been in non-socialist countries. 150 years ago British empire and the Industrial Rev + agrigultural Rev. Descovery of Graverty, discovery of Penecilin, the internal conbustion engine, ect.

60 years ago the Nazis scientists made many discoverys in all fields of science. (Yes i know all the nasty stories before you lecture me on them)

Today most of the scientific descovery's are american.

[Invader Zim]

Quote: from Capitalist Imperial on 4:40 pm on Feb. 11, 2003

Quote: from lostsoul on 4:05 pm on Feb. 11, 2003
comrades, i think i didn't make it very clear, my question was in regrades to scienctific acviements(medical or non-medical).

I was wondering how communism deals with it? Can it deal with it better then capialism?


Thanks for all your help.

History suggests that capitalist countries are much more scientifically capable than socialist nations, period.

Case in point: The USA is the most technologically and scientifically advanced nation on earth.


I can think of few major discovery which the USA has not stolen from other nations with the exception of stealth.

[Rastafari]

A.I. Oparin
Enough Said

[Tkinter1]

"I can think of few major discovery which the USA has not stolen from other nations with the exception of stealth."

You obviously have never looked AK.

[Invader Zim]

Enlighten me then if you can.

[Tkinter1]

Why? Are you incapable of finding things for yourself?


Just to start you out:
http://www.150.si.edu/150trav/remember/amerinv.htm

[timbaly]

I'm not sure about this, but didn't some american medical research company patent a certain type of stem cell research?

[Invader Zim]

Quote: from Tkinter1 on 10:26 pm on Feb. 13, 2003
Why? Are you incapable of finding things for yourself?


Just to start you out:
tp://www.150.si.edu/150trav/remember/amerinv.htm (http://tp://www.150.si.edu/150trav/remember/amerinv.htm)


I looked on that site and a lot of its all bull shit.

The only usefull inventions built by an american was the telegraph and the light bulb, the telegraph was stolen from a chinese system as i remember, and the light bulb was developed after the descovery of electricity by an english guy.

The artificial heart was an invention based on the research of many people. For example most of the early altopsies that were carried out with successful conclusions about the use of bodily organs was conducted by european scientists/alcamists in the reneasance and dark ages.

Albert Inestine was German.

The first computer was made in Bletchley Park, Bucks England.

That sewing machine was a British invention, this american just improved it.

Wow an improved way of purifying sugar what an achivement.

That Guy Washington carver yes thats a great descovery a way of making better peanuts....

[redstar2000]

I think late capitalism and science have an "uneasy" relationship.

Modern capitalists realize that some directed scientific research can be enormously profitable. On the other hand, basic research can result in discoveries that utterly destroy entire industries...including the wealth invested therein.

Therefore, scientific research must be "managed" carefully.

This is done in a variety of ways. In the U.S., funds for research now almost all originate in corporate boardrooms or government bodies (especially the Department of Defense). The corporate bias is clearly "market directed", but the Government bias is not far removed from that either.

Universities act as "channels" for government and occasional corporate grants--lately, there have been "partnership" arrangements between universities and corporations to direct research in "desired" directions. In exchange for arranging the research, the university gets "a piece of the action" if something profitable emerges.

As you might imagine, this distorts scientific research in many ways. Careerist deception is only one of them (telling the guy who writes the checks whatever he wants to hear)...and may not be the most important outcome. The very concept of "intellectual property protection" serves to undermine the free communication among scientists that is vital to the crucial task of verifying results.

A "blue sky" proposal--a "wild" idea that some possible genius wants to check out--is unlikely to receive a research grant and thus the research may never be done. As science becomes more "market-driven", this will happen more and more often...driving down the frequency of "breakthrough" discoveries.

If capitalism lasts long enough, science should more or less come to a halt...save for incremental improvements in existing technology. Only something with an almost guaranteed "payoff" will get funded.

The picture is not entirely bleak; there will be occasional wealthy individuals who for individual motives might fund "blue sky" research which lead to new breakthroughs. But those are "favorable" accidents, hardly to be counted on.

As I understand it, this situation is most advanced in the U.S....there is more "freedom of research" in Europe. But I've heard the same evolutionary process is also talking place there, and that's not a good sign.

Would communist society be an improvement? Although science in communist society would not be "market-driven", it could be driven by "practical-minded" bureaucrats in much the same direction.

That stereotypical question: "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we [solve practical problem X]?" can always be asked by the unimaginative of any political persuasion.

But I think the "spirit" (for want of a better word) of communism is basically more favorable to scientific creativity than is increasingly the case under capitalism. I think "blue sky" research proposals will stand a better chance of getting funded and the frequency of genuine breakthroughs will increase. Some resources will be "wasted", of course...in science, "wild ideas" often turn out to be wrong or even just wacko. But science without creativity eventually just becomes a book of recipes. And then it becomes a book of old recipes.

:cool:

PS to peaccenicked: Terrific post!



(Edited by redstar2000 at 12:14 pm on Feb. 14, 2003)

[Tkinter1]

"The artificial heart was an invention based on the research of many people. For example most of the early altopsies that were carried out with successful conclusions about the use of bodily organs was conducted by european scientists/alcamists in the reneasance and dark ages."

Alchemist? No. You don't know what an alchemist is. This whole history blurb is completley off.

If the Americans didn't event it, they improved it. Inventing better ways to use things, is still inventing.

Everything else you said was either an opinion or unsubstantiated.

[antieverything]

You just beat me to the punch, RedStar.

Much of the medical research that private corporations engage in is partially funded by the government...now, what would happen if the government funded the research and then these wonderful advances in technology and medicine would be given to the people even if it would mean less profits. A good technological example would be alternative fuel inventions and inventions that make cars incredibly fuel efficient. Every time an inventor comes up with something like this the oil corps just buy the poor sap out and sit on the patent. Did you know that light-bulbs that last for decades were invented decades ago? Same with the soles of shoes. Yep...you've seen it with your own eyes. Markets can fail! GASP!