Marx and the State
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Libcom website has re-published an article from the Marxist Humanist Initiative website which is illuminating.
https://libcom.org/article/karl-marx-and-state
Bakunin asks, “Will all 40 million [German workers] be members of the government?” Marx responds, “Certainly! For the system starts with the self-government of the communities.”
Marx would’ve replied with the same answer, if asked about ‘science’, too, alan.
Democratic control of any social power was the political and philosophical basis of Marx’s social productionism.
If anyone is interested in a ‘scientific’ application of Marx’s social productionism, have a read of the chapter ‘Science as Social Action’, in Lewontin, R. C. (1993) Biology as Ideology, pp. 105-23, in which he argues that ‘organisms create their own environment’, and thus are able to change it.
David Adam, ‘Karl Marx & the State’ (alan’s link) wrote:
“To reiterate Marx’s point, there is a material contradiction in commissioning members of a divided and atomized civil society to somehow represent the general interest of that society. Even from a formal point of view, the deputies recognized as deriving their mandate solely from the popular masses, become, once elected, independent of their electors, and are free to make political decisions on their behalf. This is distinct from Marx’s vision of a society that “administers its own universal interests.” As Marx put it, “The efforts of civil society to transform itself into a political society, or to make the political society into the real one, manifest themselves in the attempt to achieve as general a participation as possible in the legislature . . . . The political state leads an existence divorced from civil society. For its part, civil society would cease to exist if everyone became a legislator.”9 There is an important point here: the separation of the state from civil society depends on limiting popular participation in government.”
The same political and philosophical point applies to science, too.
The separation of science from civil society depends on limiting popular participation in science.
The only democratic socialist answer is ‘to achieve as general a participation as possible in’ science.
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