March for Science | Why I will not be marching with the "liberal nerds"

Cartoon sketch courtesy of People and Nature.

Racism; blindness to capitalism in science communities allows continued exposure and risk disparities

A
FAILURE TO CONFRONT RACISM and CAPITALIST CONTROL OF SCIENCE UNDERMINES TIES TO
OTHER MOVEMENTS

The quest for
gold brought to light many useful inventions

and
advanced society in innumerable ways.

-Sir Francis Bacon

I
consider myself an “ethno-scientist.” The methods and practices I follow in the
fields of agroecology, ethnoecology, and related areas reflect my grounding in
millennia of indigenous knowledge and study of ecological processes in the human-nature
interrelationship. The two cultures divide that C. P. Snow lamented because it
separates the humanities from the natural sciences remains a central concern
for me as a practitioner of community-based collaborative and interdisciplinary research.

Yet,
I am not marching today. And it is not because I am anti-science. I am against
continued widespread reductionism of and in science (e.g., the geneticization of all phenomena); I am against continued
service of scientists in the capitalist control of knowledge production and the
deployment of technologies that place our health, safety, and well-being at
higher risk. I am certain many of the scientists marching today will feel the
same way; but this is a minority worldview.

The
scientists leading the march are basically calling on us to collaborate with
the current kleptocracy with hopes this regime will grant respect and support for
“free” (qua, de-politicized) scientific
inquiry. But the history and philosophy of science reveal how scientific
inquiry has never been “free” in any meaningful sense as a culture and practice
community separated from economic and political forces and institutions.

The
M4S (March for Science) has espoused two principal narratives and goals:

(1) The march organizers call on the administration to restore the role of science in setting
public policies and regulations. This call legitimizes what is
essentially a murderous, criminal regime of billionaires whose principal
objective is to dismantle the so-called “administrative state.” Wishing this call
will somehow lead to the restoration of science-based policy-making is dangerously
naïve and riddled with contradictions, erasures and silences. From a
decolonial stand point, these contradictions can be understood to stem from the
continued “unbearable whiteness” of the STEM fields (science, technology,
engineering, mathematics).

A message to potential
white allies and accomplices: Please do not stop reading this because you take
offense at my use of the “unbearable whiteness” phrase, which I have actually borrowed
from a white feminist scholar criticizing the alternative food movement. A
failure to read on would also indicate for me an abdication of our shared need
for continued and growing correspondence; a retreat from our engagement via accusations
of reverse racism would constitute an expression of another problem, the
discursive strategy of “white fragility” which in the end silences the critical
“parrhesiastic” voices.

(2)
A declaration that the goals of the march are
not political or partisan is an important thread in this narrative and the
M4S effort represents a call to rid politics from interfering with the conduct
of “objective” (value-free, neutral) scientific discourse and practice. This is
another dangerous liberal ideology and obscures the manner in which the
powerful force of market institutions long have reduced scientists to the roles
of willing or unwitting “servants of power,” to borrow a phrase from Loren
Baritz (1960).

The
call should instead involve a plea for non-cooperation with capitalism or a regime that will
always disagree and suppress scientific knowledge that contradicts selfish economic interests; the billionaires running the current regime and
will never respect, especially, the climate scientists and climate justice
communities seeking to align themselves to collaborate across the “two
cultures” divide.

Scientists
need to withdraw from collaborating with federal, state, or corporate interests
or agencies that are not just anti-science but anti-health, anti-safety, and anti-Earth.
Scientists need to consider a strategic boycott and a withdrawal of their
labor; they must not remain subservient or obsequious under the empire of a capitalist
dictatorship over the planet.

Critics
of the M4S note the march is but a self-interested response to Trump’s war on
science and how it lacks grounding in broader mass-based movements against the capitalist
anti-ecological rationality of the extant global neoliberal regime. Too many of
these (mostly white male) scientists are disconnected from the struggles of
indigenous and peoples of color as well as other vulnerable communities.

Some
critics are correct to note a long chain of “science-related crises” like Flint
and #NoDAPL during which the larger scientific community failed to provide direct
or mass support for our most vulnerable.  J. Ama Mantey is among the critics who have
recently brought attention to racism within the liberal scientific community.
Please read Mantey’s eloquent op-ed piece, “#MarginSci: The March for Science
as a Microcosm of Liberal Racism,” appearing in theroot.com.

However,
critics like Mantey do not go deep enough. The problem with the M4S is bigger
than a righteous critique of the liberal attitude of self-interest and a
pandering to diversity initiatives that at best clone students into the same
occupation that serves the continued corporate domination of scientific
research.

Scientists
in the federal fold, many of whom circulate between governmental and corporate
jobs, have missed numerous opportunities to collaborate with mass social
movements and key campaigns against the politicization of science which too
often operates in the service of extractive capitalist industries. When did the
broader science community express relational solidarity with Standing Rock? Too
busy trying to make a livelihood from fracking perhaps?

But
let’s go deeper: Even Rachel Carson, back in the sixties, forgot to mention the
United Farm Workers because she failed to recognize the relevance to science of
the farm worker anti-pesticides campaign (1965-71). Missed opportunities for
relational solidarity with our most vulnerable communities have a long history even
among the most liberal or progressive members of scientific circles. This is
indicative of how scientists are creatures of their social location which
places many of them in a culture of white privilege that is itself a creature
of previous political projects tied to the rise of colonial empires of all
sorts.

I
wonder how many IT technologists have left our universities for jobs designing
near-light speed algorithms for hedge funds seeking to capitalize by nanosecond
calculations off investments that spawn hunger, malnutrition, or climate chaos
for that matter? I wonder how many are people of color? Like I said, servants
of power.

Scientists
may presume themselves as somehow entitled to be recognized and valued as makers
and movers of a system based on an objective model of the so-called “free
market of ideas,” which for me is but a corollary of an unstated faith in the
“invisible hand” of the market. In other words, this is ideology not science.

The
M4S organizers declare they are responding to massive cutbacks in federal
funding for scientific research. Let me be clear: The scientific community
needs to develop a better understanding of the nature of institutionalized racism,
to be sure, but critics overlook the additional problem of insisting that
scientists develop a clearer understanding of capitalism.

What
I have in mind goes beyond a call for ethical reflection as an appendage to
science instruction. Instead, scientists need to understand how capitalism is the
principal force that has always politicized and shaped scientific inquiry; from
the get go.

Sir Francis Bacon. Courtesy of Sun Nation.

Scientists
need to understand how science has always been market-steered and therefore
politicized. The strange and iconic case of Francis Bacon illustrates this. The
“father of the modern scientific revolution” was also a technologist. He
fancied himself a true objective rationalist and individualist who was ready, willing,
and able to deliver the actual means and methods to serve the expansion of the
British Empire. He was also quite adept as a witness in the witch trials conducted
at a time when men like him were actively plotting the takeover of medicine and
surgery by persecuting women healers as demonic threats to the cause of
“objective” scientific rationality.

The
problem is more than the fact that Baconians are still among us and are the
penultimate liberals. This is the heart of the contradiction of a faith in the
liberal free market place of ideas: The longstanding political (and also
corporate) control of funding of scientific research produces a market-steered
science agenda. This has always been the case. Social scientists—including
sociologists of knowledge and students of the philosophy and history of science
and technology—have long made an alarming call for clarity about who gets to
define what science is; what knowledge gets qualified as such; how it is to be produced;
and the broader applied purposes it should serve.

In
the 1970s, as a student at the University of Texas, I was introduced by my
mentor in the graduate program in sociology, Gilberto Cardenas, to the work of Gerard
Radnitzky, the author of a book, Contemporary
Schools of Metascience, that remains a relevant intervention for
understanding the politics of science. Radnitzki (1970) viewed the practice of
science as a part of the “knowledge-producing industries” and he outlined how
these industries operate with “a complex set of role-types which aim for market
share in the market place of ideas, practices and programs” (von Eckartsberg
1992, 84; commenting on Radnitzky).

In
other words, the political and ideological values of capitalism, which are not science-based, exert
powerful pressures that shape, mold, and constrain scientific research agendas,
methods, adopted interpretive schemas, and even the questions asked or
hypotheses posed. The organizers of the M4S appear to understand this much and
yet they willingly subject us all to the continued reign of the empire of
capital and so the need for a delinking of knowledge production from coloniality is not addressed. This idea is far from being discussed let alone internalized as part of the normative infrastructure of science.

The
science historian, Rolf von Eckartsberg, long ago noted how, “Our contemporary
world-market civilization certainly makes the economic metaphor of
knowledge-production and knowledge-distribution, knowledge- and
discourse-competition…relevant. [Scientific] [p]aradigms…compete for acceptance
just like political ideologies do” (1992, 85). 

The same process also shapes the transformation and application
of scientific research findings into practical (exploitable) technologies; in this sense, science has always been interlaced with the activities of political and economic elites. 

Understanding this history is critical to what the scientists, who march today, do to
move toward a call to action that is explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist and not
just “pro-science.”  In closing, I note there is a San Francisco group participating today as an anti-capitalist bloc. I will join the march when scientists engage in relational solidarity as accomplices and stand together with diaspora and immigrant rights advocates; Black Lives Matter activists; the defenders and water protectors of the thousands of Flints and Standing Rocks across our ravaged landscapes; and the food chain workers who no doubt serve the scientists in their university cafes and more exclusive redoubts. When that day comes I will no longer have to ask, whose science do you serve? And I will march.