When you get a chance, please check out the newest addition to my blogroll, Marxist Intellectuals of the World, Unite! It's by a maths student. Right away it piqued my interest, because I'm more used to Marxists being history or political science students.

I don't do numbers

I'm very interested in 'hard' science as a practice and discourse. It's popular on the left to say science is just another ideology - this may be true, I haven't made up my mind about that yet.

However, science as a method of reasoning and experimentation is a valuable tool, and I'm not just saying that because I wouldn't have an iPod without it. Marx called communism 'scientific socialism' because it understands society according to certain laws. These laws are radically different from natural laws - they change according to changes in different spheres of production, ideology, etc. And the point of a socialist revolution is to change those laws (or transcend, overcome them, etc.)


Sister Mary Sylvester Deconge: proof that mathematicians can be smart and sexy

Thus I want to know how science can be used as a weapon in the class struggle. I'm not a Stalinist about this; I don't think 'bourgeois' science is automatically reactionary - or, indeed, that there's any such thing as proletarian science. However, I do think that bourgeois & proletarian interests compete to use the results of science, and therefore the presentation of those interests is never neutral. I think the global warming 'debate' is a great example of how science can operate as a tool of, or in opposition to, imperialism. And how scientists themselves struggle to remain neutral, in the face of political forces who don't want their findings heard.

The Dialectic

The dialectic is the key element of Marxist philosophy, with a lot of bad, reductionist writing littering our tradition. I'm still coming to terms with the dialectic, but to me it means analyzing individual social elements as moments of a whole. You can distinguish the base, superstructure, law, politics, whatever - in fact you have to separate these parts out, in order to talk about them coherently. But that separation can only be methodological. As soon as you start treating those elements as separate in fact, with an independent existence, you lose a concept of social totality, and then you're fucked. Society can't be explained, and therefore it can't be revolutionized.


Stalin on air parade - sometimes a rigid hierarchy is better than dialectics, if you're at the top

So, I think the dialectic is both a method, and a premise. If you look for discrete elements adding up to a whole, you'll find them. You may be creating ideology, but it'll 'work' according to the logic you assign it. If you view elements (of nature, society, or whatever you're analyzing) as internally related to one another, then there's nothing outside the dialectic. Analyzing society is the same as changing it.

I'm reading Base & Superstructure in Historical Materialism, by Frank Jakubowski, which is short, clear and has lots good to say about this. (I have an extra copy to give away, if someone wants to pay for the postage.) Alienation: The Condition of Man in Capitalist Society, by Bertell Ollman, is also good, as I've referenced before.