MIM NOTES 195 October 1, 1999 New York Times notices that science production is political by MC5 In a case of better late than never, a generation after the Chinese Cultural Revolution the New York Times has noticed that the production of science is a political process -- even in the United $tates. Titled "Lobbying for Research Money, Colleges Bypass Review Process," the lead article of the August 24th issue of the New York Times admits that universities spend millions lobbying Congress for scientific research money. "By asking lawmakers to insert provisions called earmarks into spending bills, universities and their lobbyists have obtained more than $7 billion since 1980. Earmarked legislation in this year's Federal budget was a record $797 million," the New York Times said. For decades, the New York Times and other capitalist newspapers have handed us communists a lot of bologna about how politics interfered with science under Stalin and Mao in the USSR and People's Republic of China respectively. We communists only insisted that the agenda and funding priorities of research have to be political and there is no way of avoiding it. We communists favor research for basic humyn needs, while the bourgeois intellectuals want the power to research anything that catches their fancy and that makes them elite. They guise their self- interests in the language of "scientific autonomy," but there is no avoiding that someone has to decide research priorities and that different priorities serve different people. Now defending the political process in the United $tates, Boston University chancellor and ardent anti-communist John R. Silber says about his success in lobbying for academic money, "'people talk about sordid -- they'd better read the Constitution . . . 'I've got a right to appeal to the Congress. Every citizen does. If that's dirty, the whole country's dirty.'" Counter-attacking the lingering illusions promoted by the academic elite to pull the wool over the eyes of the people, Silber points out that even peer-review as conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and such processes are guided by the ole' boy network. Referring to himself as the "new boy," Silber says Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard and Columbia dominate the process of establishment academia. MIM would add that peer-reviewed science still has a political agenda, because Congress decides how much to fund in what areas. Academic decisions made can and do have political impact and approval. Promising fields develop, as well as emergencies such as AIDS. The funding for such research is politically determined and always has been. We can only hope the New York Times might notice the nature of the peer-review process next. The bourgeois media has given us communists a very hard time about a plant breeder named Trofim D. Lysenko under Stalin that Stalin sided with -- conclusively around 1948. Lysenko was doing interesting work as a "green thumb" in a country and world facing bouts of famine. We proletarians say his agenda was in the right place. For the bourgeoisie, his real crime was not the debate over inklings of genetic science at the time that were of no use to plant breeders. The bourgeois propagandists write as if the communists invented the political process of science production, as if there was scientific "autonomy" before communism. They say we "repressed" the intellectuals opposing Lysenko. The bourgeois scientists attack us communists without having read Lysenko for supposedly opposing genetic science. Only eight Amerikans requested reprints of Lysenkoite work when they were translated into English. A chemistry professor at Oregon State University lost his job for suggesting investigation of Lysenko's ideas. Then the bourgeois propagandists say we communists repress intellectuals and introduce politics into science!(1) A Soviet biologist named Nikolai I. Vavilov died in prison during World War II during a ten-year sentence, but the accusations were not with regard to intellectual theories.(2) Many others suffered a similar fate in that most difficult period of Nazi invasion. Most of the impact of Lysenko's support by the state was that some biologists left or were kicked out of communist parties. Lysenko's ideas got funding and the ideas of others did not. Anti-Lysenko geneticists did not get funded to go to the United $tates for conferences on genetics. The abstract genetic science that was at stake was no use to people starving at that time. It still hasn't produced useful results for the starving today that couldn't have been done without advances in pure genetic theory. However, geneticists have been involved in the forced sterilization of the poor. The people attacking Lysenko were people who created an intellectual climate justifying Hitler's pseudo-scientific genetic ideas. In fact, it is now confirmed that early Western geneticists widely supported racism and sterilizing the poor in a doomed attempt to create a superior (read "master" in Hitler's idea) race. Plant breeders in the Soviet Union did fine without implementing non-existent or inapplicable ideas about genetics -- mainly by watching how much food they got from various seeds in varying conditions. Yields rose most quickly under Lysenkoite dominance.(3) The bourgeois media did not care about the starving, so it focussed its attack on abstractions poorly understood then and only being fully investigated today. Arguably the leading geneticist at the time, even J.B. S. Haldane insisted that there was no way of knowing yet whether or not Lysenko was right.(4) After Stalin died and Lysenko's ideas lost favor, grain yields declined in the Soviet Union and the stagnation of agriculture caused by bourgeois science was a major reason that Khruschev and leaders onward implemented capitalism. Bourgeois intellectuals work in areas that only few may tread. It is in their self-interest to be the exceptional or the only people capable in that work. It can be very similar to being the monopoly owner of a commodity. The more theoretical or the more costly to accomplish, the better for the elite scientists seeking to create barriers to entry of more experts. In contrast, the proletarian intellectual does not fear application of work and the masses by the millions taking it up. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao forced a change of direction by unleashing the "barefoot doctors" against those who wanted to continue to generate elite doctors not even sufficient to serve China's urban minority. The result of such applied-side intellectual leadership by Mao was that China's life expectancy doubled in a generation. There was and is a lot of complaining about the inevitable turmoil of such a transformation, but the Maoist idea did more to prolong life than anything else in the world history. The Cultural Revolution also sliced more than half off the budgets of "pure science" as typically practiced in the West.(5) Scientists who formerly had their food and clothes provided for by the peasants and workers suddenly found that if they wanted to continue to be scientists and be fed for it, they would have to go to the countryside and apply their work there. This simple action has created more than half the literature about supposed traumas in China in the Cultural Revolution. It is a literature by people who could not make the adjustment to what they considered the barbaric conditions of the countryside and they blamed Mao for making them adjust to the conditions under which most people live. These bourgeois intellectuals are the ones who have invented elaborate mythologies about the Cultural Revolution, when its purposes and policies were all printed in black-and-white. It is typical for intellectuals, as a group, to be strongly pulled toward making up stories that serve their self-interests as elite power-holders. They were the ones who invented religions for their own benefits and the idea of a "witchdoctor" for instance. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) did not prove that individual ideas in genetic sciences or physics or any other science were wrong. The Cultural Revolution simply changed the funding agenda. For that, the Cultural Revolution has been attacked. No scientists were taken at gun-point and forced to work anywhere in the Cultural Revolution. Fighting that broke out amongst factions at the universities was not sanctioned by Mao and it had its own reasons. All that Mao did was reveal to intellectuals the distance they felt from the people of their own country. He did not make science political. It already was. Notes: 1. Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 185. 2. Ibid., p 187. 3. Ibid., p. 191. 4. Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 215. 5. Henry Park, "The Political Economy of Counterrevolution in China: 1976-1988." (Available from MIM for $20.)