It must be evident to any intelligent person that the dictatorship of the proletariat, once it has survived the initial critical period, will engender an unprecedented flowering of the natural sciences and technology. Indeed, it is clear that technology cannot be free to realise its full and at present scarcely conceivable potentialities until the profit barrier has disappeared. Given all this, however, the question arises: will and should the method of the natural sciences play the same definitive and omnipotently influential role in the education, thinking, emotions, sciences and philosophy of the new society as it did in bourgeois society? For we have to be quite clear on this point: every aspect of human life in bourgeois society was dominated by that method. The mere fact that - discounting a few (as we shall see later) reactionary exceptions - the knowledge produced by the natural sciences was regarded as knowledge as such, or at least as the ideal type of knowledge; the fact that in this respect the main currents in bourgeois philosophy (materialism à la Büchner, Kantianism and empirio-criticism) were all in agreement - this is proof enough, which for the lack of space we are neither able nor willing to elaborate upon at this juncture. That this was so is no mere coincidence. Not only did the natural sciences make possible the - capitalistic - rationalisation of production, etc. for bourgeois society; their methodology also provided it with an excellent ideological weapon in the struggle against both the declining feudal system and the rising proletariat. ... If the nascent capitalist society was to prise the worker free for its purposes, it had not only to remove the economic and political ties of the old order, but also to shatter its ideological foundations. It therefore had to replace the personal god with the impersonal law of nature; the old authority had to be destroyed, but a new one raised on the throne in its stead. This new authority is the law of nature. Its function is twofold. On the one hand it destroys the old authority, shattering the belief among the masses that the feudal form of oppression and exploitation is an eternally valid and divinely ordained order. On the other hand, however, it arouses in them the belief that the capitalist system of production, impersonal and ostensibly conforming to the laws of nature, corresponds to the eternal laws of human reason, is independent of human volition and indestructible in the face of human strivings; that it is, in fact, a second nature. We can see here the connection between bourgeois economics and the method of the natural sciences. Just how strong it is is proved by he fact that the political dilution of Marxism at the end of the nineteenth century was accompanied by the infiltration of that very bourgeois scientism into historical materialism. Lukács, Tactics and Ethics, pp. 91-2
Posted on: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 05:17:03 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015