I am surprised a new left formation, which I began looking at with enthusiastic interest, would recycle Science for the People. It belongs to a passed/past generation. Although the perspective there has often been able to expose ideology the issue of the Darwinian paradigm, e.g. sociobiology, it has always compromised with the Darwin establishment on the issue of selectionist theory. The party line was to displace the critique of ideology onto someone else, usually Spenser, while Darwin and his theory were left intact. That core confusion, I won’t say deception, made their efforts on the subject miss the mark. The source of social darwinism is Darwin himself and his theory. Why on earth revive this dead mass for a new movement on the left? The left needs to produce a critique of Darwinism asap and lead beyond the capitalism Darwin fetish with a part of expose of the whole evolution racket.
The question of science on the left has long been crippled, and not just with respect to evolution, but with the corpse of historical materialism and Marx’s archaic theories about history and economic determination. And the new realm of physics from Quantum Mechanics to Quantum Field Theory, with the joker in the deck of String theory points beyond old-fashioned materialism to, well, what indeed.
The left should be critical Darwin, rescue the empirical study of evolution from ideological theory and move beyond the stale materialism of an era still dominated by Newtonian thinking: the early nineteenth century, Marx’s stomping grounds. It is sad to consider: just at the moment of doing something new, and new energy on the left, the tired vampire of archaic marxism raises its head.
A movement in which I won’t be welcome.
Goodbye to you.
Source: Volume 23, Number 1: Science Under Occupation • Science for the People Magazine
