The Scientist and the Church by Nitzan and Bichler

[Jonathan Nitzan <nitzan@xxxxxxxx>]

THE SCIENTIST AND THE CHURCH
By Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler

The full article: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/185/

The April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead
article titled "Blood for Oil?" The paper is attributed to a group of
writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and
Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name "Retort."
In their article, the authors advance a supposedly new explanation for
the wars in the Middle East.

Much of their explanation – including both theory and fact – is
plagiarized. It is cut and pasted, almost "as is," from our own work.
The primary source is "The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition," a
71 page chapter in our book THE GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ISRAEL
(Pluto 2002). The authors also seem inspired, incognito, by our more
recent papers, including "It’s All About Oil" (2003), "Clash of
Civilization or Capital Accumulation?" (2004), "Beyond Neoliberalism"
(2004) and "Dominant Capital and the New Wars" (2004).

In their paper, the Retort group credits us for having coined the term"
Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition" – but dismiss our "precise
calibration of the oil/war nexus" as "perfunctory." This dismissal does
not prevent them from freely appropriating, wholesale fashion, our
concepts, ideas and theories – including, among others, the "era of free
flow," the "era of limited flow," "Energy Conflicts," the"
commercialization of arms exports," the "politicization of oil" and the
critique of the "scarcity thesis." Nowhere in their article do the
authors mention the source of these concepts, ideas and theories;
occasionally, they even introduce them with the prefix "Our view is...."
Their treatment of facts is not very different. They freely use
(sometimes without understanding) research methods, statistics and data
that took us years to conceive, estimate and measure – again, never
mentioning the source.

These concepts, theories and facts are far from trivial. Until recently,
they were greeted with strategic silence, from both right and left.
Their publication has been repeatedly denied and censored by mainstream
as well as progressive journals (including, it must be said, by the
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, that turned down our paper on the subject). They
can be found nowhere else in the literature, conservative or radical. To
treat them as "common knowledge" is deceitful. To cut and paste them
without due attribution is blatant plagiarism. The first part of our
paper illustrates this process of "intellectual
accumulation-by-dispossession" with selected examples.

The issue, though, goes well beyond personal vanity and
self-aggrandizement. At the core, we are dealing here with the clash of
science and church, with the constant attempt of organized faith –
whether religious or academic – to disable, block and, if necessary,
appropriate creativity and novelty. Creativity and novelty are
dangerous. They defy dogma and undermine the conventional creed; they
challenge the dominant ideology and threaten those in power;
occasionally, they cause the entire edifice of power to crumble.

For these reasons, the latent purpose of intellectual
accumulation-by-dispossession – like the accumulation of private
property – is primarily negative. The word "private" comes from the
Latin "privatus," meaning "restricted," and from "privare," which means
"to deprive." And, indeed, the most important feature of private
ownership is not to ENABLE THOSE WHO OWN, but to DISABLE THOSE WHO DO
NOT. It is only through the threat of prevention – or "strategic
sabotage" as Thorsein Veblen called it – that accumulation can take
place. It is only by restricting the free creativity of society that
society itself can be controlled. The second section of the paper
explains how the appropriators of "Blood for Oil?" fit this pattern.

The final section of the paper is an epilogue. It describes our failed
attempts to get this paper published with The LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS;
Retort’s efforts to mislead us; and some additional insight from their
AFFLICTED POWERS, a 2005 Verso book that contains the same plagiarism
and more. The epilogue concludes with a few observations on the nature
of academic dialectics.

[...]

The full article: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/185/