Re: Exchanges on Marxism and ecology

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> bernie wool <bernard.wool@xxxxxxxxx> 10/20/99 05:15PM >>>
It's worth also remembering that scientists versed in 'dialectical materialism.
included Lysencko and Beloussov, who respectively engineered the almost compete
disappearence of genetics in the Soviet Union and contributed to the failure of
collective agriculture and mass starvation, and set back Soviet Earth Sciences 
by
many decades because of a similar proscription of ideas of a dynamic planet
continually in change.  The former SU and Eastern bloc countries became 
ecological
wastelands through the willful failure to accept ideas in ecology.

(((((((((((

Charles: How can we forget this ? The bourgeois media remind us of these 
failures
every chance they get. In the _Time_ magazine review of the great scientists and
thinkers  of the 20th Century, Lysenko , the only Marxist, is coupled with Josef
Mengele as a main villain.

What about all the failures and hoaxers that were not "versed " in dialectical
materialism ?  In other words, so what if some people versed in dialectical
materialsim get it wrong sometimes.  One would expect that. But there isn't a 
higher
rate of failures and hoaxing among dia-maters, as the constant references to 
Lysenko
suggest. We almost never hear of the many Soviet scientists who made valid 
discoveries.

((((((((((



I think that Charles has things the wrong way around in "Who says dialectical
materialism hasn't produced results in natural science ?".  Philosophy 
abstracts at a
general level from the empirical advance of knowledge of the world and people.  
It
may be predictive in a general way, but the fact that, for instance, 
confirmation by
experiment of Einstein's relativity helped contribute to the development of 
Marxism
(well, it should have done, but we see very little discussion of that among 
Marxists)
does not prove the opposite.  Einstein was not a Marxist, and the same goes for
virtually every scientist.  This is not surprising, for the same process of
alienation goes on in science and technology as it does throughout a society
dominated by capital.  The problem, as I see it, is not a failure to deploy
'dialectical materialism' in science, but that science is chained and distorted 
by
capital..

(((((((((((((

Charles: It doesn't make sense that it would only work in one direction: that 
we only
look at empirically confirmed theories and see them demonstrating dialaectics.
Dialectics should be a heuristic device for suggesting answers to problems in
empirical science.

CB


Charles Brown wrote:

> >>> Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> 10/19/99 09:17PM >>>
> 1) John Bellamy Foster replying to Michael Perelman's query whether ecology
> existed prior to the 1850's:
>
> >From the standpoint of today the three greatest ecological
> discoveries all came from the Marxist theorists and Soviet scientists: the
> idea of the biosphere, the discovery of the original centers of agriculture
> and the sources of germplasm, and the theory of the origins of life.  It was
> the Oparin/Haldane theory of the origin of life that provided the foundation
> for Rachel Carson's most comprehensive ecological statement.
>
> (((((((((((
>
> CB: Who says dialectical materialism hasn't produced results in natural 
> science ?
>
> CB