Is Science Political?

an article by Michael D. Gordin in the Boston Review posted to 3 Quarks Daily by S. Abbas Raza


Sidney Hook speaking at the opening session of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Berlin on June 26, 1950. The second day of the conference featured a panel on “Science and Totalitarianism.” Image: cia.gov

The word “science” typically evokes epistemic ambitions to explore the fundamental laws of the natural world. This is the stuff of philosophical reflection and documentary specials—and it is unquestionably important. This ethereal vision of science appears starkly divorced from the messy fray of “politics,” however you might want to understand the term.

Yet consider two other central features of today’s science: it is élite, and it is expensive. By élite, I do not mean that only certain sorts of people – the “right sorts” – have the capacity to do science. What I mean is that you cannot just pick up and decide today that you are going to be a scientist. It requires years, even decades, of training in the methods and practices of inquiry; consulting a scientist means that you are obligated to turn to someone who has already undergone that process. You do science with the scientists you have, regardless of whether they are socially or politically agreeable to you.

More here.

Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science
Audra J. Wolfe
Johns Hopkins University Press, $29.95 (cloth)

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Just because the map says so, doesn't mean it's true

Thirty years after 1989, from an island perspective

an article by Owen Hatherley published in Eurozine (March 2019)

The workings of western capitalism were almost as unknown in the Eastern Bloc as the everyday realities of ‘real socialism’ were among western Trotskyists. Then, after ’89, eastern Europe disappeared off the political map of the left. Nowhere was this more so than in Britain, writes Owen Hatherley.

I can remember three particular moments of realising there was a distinct thing called ‘Eastern Europe’ which was different from ‘Western Europe’, and both of them date me as being just about old enough to remember the Soviet Union. One is at Christmas 1989, in my grandmother’s flat on the Isle of Wight, an appropriately plush location to watch, on BBC News, the uprising in Romania and the subsequent televised execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu, and learn several new words, like ‘dictator’ and ‘firing squad’. Also often said was the word ‘Communism’, but my Trotskyist parents referred to themselves as ‘socialists’ rather than communists, so that wasn’t concerning. What was, was looking in the Children’s Atlas that my mother bought for me in the late 1980s and finding the existence of a very, very large country called the ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’. Being that sort of obnoxiously inquisitive child, I asked her ‘but we’re socialists, aren’t we? Isn’t this our country?’ ‘They’re not socialists. It’s very complicated’, she replied and refused to explain further. The next memory comes a few years later and concerns a Lufthansa map that my dad had brought back from work, where that space had suddenly been filled with over a dozen new countries, all with incredibly evocative names. Belarus! Azerbaijan! Kyrgyzstan!

Full text (PDF 6pp)

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Women, work, and socialism

a column by Pamela Campa and Michel Serafinelli for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

Attitudes towards work and gender simultaneously shape, and are shaped by, the conventions, practices, and policies in a given place and time.

This column explores how politico-economic regimes affect attitudes towards gender roles and labour, exploiting the rise and fall of the Iron Curtain. Results show that women in state-socialist regimes tended to have less negative and less traditional views of work and labour force participation.

Continue reading

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‘Don’t let the facts spoil a good story’

an article by Ilya Yablokov published in Eurozine (June 2017)

Russian journalism from Gorbachev to Putin

The ethos of journalistic independence that flourished in the USSR during glasnost degenerated, in the following decades, into political partisanship and commercial opportunism. In today’s Russia, self-censorship and tact are regarded as survival skills in a much-diminished sector.

Thirty years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev, the young and energetic general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, introduced the policies of glasnost – his attempt to grant freedom of speech to the Soviet people. For a society that for sixty years had lived in a state of total state censorship, this was a massive step forward. Within a couple of years, the first independent media outlets had emerged. Journalists began challenging the authorities and rapidly became heroes for millions of Soviet citizens.

Continue reading

Sorry for the long delay in bringing you this. It was hiding in the middle of the “use for ‘10_for_today’ posts”.

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