Anton Pannekoek wrote:A

March 2024 Forums General discussion Science for Communists? Anton Pannekoek wrote:A

#103806
LBird
Participant
Anton Pannekoek wrote:
A ruling class cannot voluntarily give up its own predominance; for this predominance appears to it the sole foundation of the world order. It must defend this predominance; and this it can do only so long as it has hope and self-confidence. But actual conditions cannot give self-confidence to the capitalist class; therefore it creates for itself a hope that has no support in reality. If this class were ever to see clearly the principles of social science, it would lose all faith in its own possibilities; it would see itself as an aging despot with millions of persecuted victims marching in upon him from all directions and shouting his crimes into his ears. Fearfully he shuts himself in, closes his eyes to the reality and orders his hirelings to invent fables to dispel the awful truth. And this is exactly the way of the bourgeoisie. In order not to see the truth, it has appointed professors to soothe its troubled spirit with fables. Pretty fables they are, which glorify its overlordship, which dazzle its eyes with visions of an eternal life and scatter its doubts and dreams as so many nightmares.

[my bold]https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1909/new-middle-class.htmYeah, 'professors' who produce 'fables' as bourgeois 'truth', to 'glorify its overlordship'.This applies to physics as much as sociology, comrades.We have to democratise all science.[edit – a bit more from Tony]

Anton Pannekoek wrote:
The fact that science is merely the servant of capitalism could not be more clearly expressed than in such statements…. Not the discovery of truth, but the reassurance of an increasingly superfluous class of parasites is the object of this science. No wonder that it comes into conflict with the truth.

[my bold][more]

AT wrote:
They have great notions of their own education and refinement, feel themselves elevated far above “the masses”; it naturally never occurs to them that the ideals of these masses may be scientifically correct and that the “science” of their professors may be false.

[my bold]