The Dot.

“Everything is ideology,” is a pithy sentence usually associated with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. In a Marxian sense, ideology is what is called the superstructure of society (i.e. culture, religion, art and politics); ideology consists of the ideas that sustain, and are used to justify, the ruling class’s power in particular. In our common understanding, there seem to be certain things that are outside the realm of ideology. For many in a post-Enlightenment world, science has taken this position, with a nearly dogmatic, idealised objectivity – science is something beyond the petty ideologies that occupy most of our minds and divide us in political categories. You can easily see this play out in the oft repeated slogan ‘believe the science’ with little understanding of what that really actually means. Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, rejected the idea that science was beyond ideology and somehow beyond, and outside of, society. To them, it was pretty clear that science was a social institution. Science as the institution, the method, as well as its facts and theories, are all influenced by society, ideology and social context. Whereas scientists, particularly the more liberal minded ones, might be willing to admit to the social influence on scientific institutions and academia, they are less keen on acknowledging the social and political influence on scientific facts, theories, methodologies and interpretations.

In The Dialectical Biologist Richards Lewontin and Levins write: “but nothing evokes as much hostility among intellectuals as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science. The Cartesian social analysis of science, like the Cartesian analysis in science, alienates science from society, making scientific fact and method “objective” and beyond social influence. Our view is different. We believe that science, in all its senses, is a social process that both causes and is caused by social organization. To do science is to be a social actor engaged, whether one likes it or not, in political activity. The denial of the interpenetration of the scientific and the social is itself a political act, giving support to social structures that hide behind scientific objectivity to perpetuate dependency, exploitation, racism, elitism, colonialism.” 

They go on to say that while “of course the speed of light is the same under socialism and capitalism…whether the cause of tuberculosis is said to be a bacillus or the capitalist exploitation of workers, whether the death rate from cancer is best reduced by studying oncogenes or by seizing control of factories — these questions can be decided objectively only within the framework of certain sociopolitical assumptions.” This challenges us to avoid divorcing science from its social context in a knee-jerk reaction, but to actively examine it, including the research into disease. On this point, Richard Lewontin, in his Massey Lectures on Biology as Ideology, suggests that we at times turn agents of disease into a fetish, foregoing a true analysis of causes which tend to be sociopolitical and based on people’s material conditions. Additionally, the fetishisation of objectivity prevents scientists from examining sociopolitical aspects, influences and implications of their research out of a kind of – perhaps unconscious – fear of being accused of peddling mere ideology when pointing them out. Moreover, it opens the door to unethical and objectively harmful uses of science (e.g. the atomic bomb). This is a tragic, albeit not unsurprising, consequence of bourgeois science.

Science ought to be engaged with not as the religion of scientism, nor should it be responded to with antiscience sentiments that both segments of the right and left fall prey to. Richard Levins talked about the ‘dual nature of science‘ with its very real and material contributions to humanity on one hand, and the reproduction of class relations and the social and political structures of our society on the other. This ought to allow us to place the progression of science in its proper historical context and within its historical trajectory.

Thus, while the response to the weaknesses of bourgeois science should not involve antiscience sentiments, it is important for scientists and the public alike to remember that however much we might buy into the cult of objectivity, science – as a social institution, done by social creatures – can never be completely divorced from the ideological structure of society and the underlying labour and class relations that colour much of our lives. A materialist analysis of science – integrating a holistic, dialectical view – might help us along.

*

I think there is no better example of where the shying away of the ideological and the sociopolitical falls short than the current global pandemic response. A toxic mixture of scientific advise that by the simple nature of the institutions ought to fall within the ideologically acceptable (e.g. not paying people to stay at home but hammering on reopening even when it is not epidemiologically correct to do so), a lack of trust from the people in government and scientific institutions that often feel far away and have very obviously failed them, the commoditisation of science and pharmaceuticals and the casualisation of scientists, means that we have continually exacerbated and prolonged the global Covid-19 pandemic. Ed Yong recently wrote about how public health as an endeavour in the West, has contributed to its own downfall by losing its radical starting point: “that some people were more susceptible to disease because of social problems”. But this doesn’t mean it has to end there.

Nothing about the way the pandemic has been handled in most Global North countries was inevitable. Science and medicine can be revolutionary, which is something the tiny, proud Caribbean island of Cuba shows. In Cuba, science, medicine and education have long been pillars of its revolutionary society, with a deep belief that these endeavours can be used in service of the people. To quote Che Guevara: Today one finally has the right and even the duty to be, above all things, a revolutionary doctor, that is to say a man who utilizes the technical knowledge of his profession in the service of the revolution and the people. In a similar vein, Fidel Castro once said in a speech that “The tens of thousands of scientists and doctors in our country have been educated in the philosophy of saving lives. It would be totally contradictory to their formation to ask a scientist or a doctor to work producing substances, bacteria or viruses capable of causing the death of other human beings…Doctors and not bombs.” And so, a (medical) science that is for the people, includes involving the people. This means, concretely, a system of public health that is directly involved in the community, primary care that is a part of every community and that everybody has access to, that means open access science, that means internationalism and solidarity and not a mentality of every man for himself, it means rejecting scientific knowledge being used for ill, democratising science, reckoning with modern science’s eugenic, bourgeois origins and truly following the science – messiness and all. It is possible. It is possible to tackle the pandemic with vaccines that are not, in the words of the Cuban Finlay Institute’s Director General “a commodity to sell to the governments and make big profits; the collateral effect was that the populations were partially protected from the virus.” It is possible to ultimately create a humane system where science and medicine have a strong revolutionary potential to make us, in turn, more human again; a system where illness is taken seriously, where workers are protected, where racialised and colonised people can have faith that they are cared for and the disabled are not simply discarded with semi-scientific, and often eugenic, ideological justification.

It is possible to ultimately create a humane system where science and medicine have a strong revolutionary potential to make us, in turn, more human again; a system where illness is being taken seriously, where workers are protected, where racialised and colonised people can have faith that they are cared for, and the disabled are not simply discarded with semi-scientific, and often eugenic, ideological justification.

In Socialism and Man in Cuba, Che Guevara states that a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. By acklowedging science’s dual nature, the ideological underpinnings of bourgeois science and its revolutionary potential when truly in the service of the people, we can change both the individual and our communities. We can, and must, be guided by love for the people as much as we love science. It is time for a science by the people, for the people. Solidarity forever.

May the angels lead you into paradise;
may the martyrs receive you at your coming
and lead you to the holy city Jerusalem.
May choirs of angels receive you and with Lazarus,
once poor, may you have eternal rest.

November is traditionally a month Catholics dedicate to the holy souls in Purgatory. It’s a time to contemplate and pray for the dead. As the days shorten, the nights get a little bit darker as we inch towards the darkness’ apex at the solstice, it seems particularly natural to contemplate death and endings. Memento mori – remember you will die. Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.

When discussing death and endings, it is impossible not to think about the pandemic – still omnipresent, however much many of us try to pretend it isn’t – and all the people it has claimed and continues to claim. The families who have to miss loved-ones. The elders who were sacrificed on the altar of mammon. We might reflect, too, on those that have lost their lives this year in wars and aggression, from Palestine to Afghanistan, the migrants who are dying in Fortress Europe, the homeless and those marginalised who are suffering to protect capital. Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.

Our ancestors’ bones, buried in the land, are a source of new life. Babies are born. We love and care for each other and our elders. We grieve losses together. We fight for justice together. We remember our history and traditions together. We love the land. And the olive harvest continues regardless.

Yet…

It is too easy to retreat into doomerism. It is too easy to despair and become a nihilist. It isn’t strange that many, feeling the weight of injustice and a sense of impending climate doom, resort to giving up. But life has a tendency to renew itself. Hope can be revolutionary. James Baldwin once said “I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.” Our ancestors’ bones, buried in the land, are a source of new life. Babies are born. We love and care for each other and our elders. We grieve losses together. We fight for justice together. We remember our history and traditions together. We love the land. And the olive harvest continues regardless. Hope can be renewed in the morning. I think of the words of Mahmoud Darwish, always with a smile:

We have on this earth what makes life worth living:
April’s hesitation,
the aroma of bread at dawn,
a woman’s point of view about men,
the works of Aeschylus,
the beginning of love,
grass on a stone,
mothers living on a flute’s sigh
and the invaders’ fear of memories.

November is the month of the dead – our communal memento mori. But at the end of this November is Advent’s start, where we await the coming of the Light. And we remember that there is always hope. And that there is nothing more human than our tendency towards life. Struggle on, comrades. Struggle on.

Play The Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony in a random room, and soon follows a choir of voices belting the Britpop classic’s lyrics.

Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony this life.

Trying to make ends meet, trying to find some money then you die.

Its lyrics are enduring, perhaps because of a visceral relatability: it is certainly true that when you strip our lives within capitalism to its bare bones, it is mostly about trying to make ends meet, trying to make some money – one might even say we’re slaves to money – and then eventually, like everything else, we die. Perhaps no time has this been more literal than during this year’s Covid-19 pandemic, where hundreds of thousands of people have been laid off or furloughed, and many more jobs are hanging in the balance. And unfortunately, many people have also died because of the interlinked nature of the ‘economy’ and our public health.

A common refrain during the pandemic, amongst a smorgasbord of liberal and right-wing pundits and politicians alike, has been that we cannot let the economy suffer at the expense of tackling the pandemic. Some people, both economists, fringe public health experts and laypeople alike, have suggested that the elderly and those with underlying health conditions should sacrifice themselves – either by accepting possible death or by self-isolating indefinitely – as ‘the economy’ is rescued and the virus is allowed to slowly and insidiously ripple through society. Like sacrificial lambs at the altar of Mammon – the God of money. The consequences of this worship of ‘the economy’ at the expense of everything else – including our humanity – has made it difficult for people who are willing to self-isolate or stay at home as much as possible to do so, if consequently they might lose their jobs or their ability to feed their families. In addition, as mentioned on this blog before, the victims of this virus are often working-class and minoritised populations (and particularly where these two identities converge), as many work in essential professions and live in multigenerational households. Students are forced back to university, likely to provide the marketised institutions with a steady stream of tuition fees, and the university residence hall landlords with tenants’ rent, whilst lecturers are losing their already precarious jobs; workers who were furloughed are forced back to work; workers lose their jobs; healthcare workers are overworked and terrified of spreading the disease to their loved ones or their patients; those with chronic illnesses and disabilities and the elderly are isolated and treated like burdens. Twas ever thus.

*

The Western Church has as of the day of writing (29 November) entered into a new liturgical year which is also the First Sunday of Advent, the official start of the Christmas season. The season’s first Gospel reading starts with Jesus’s words to His disciples: “Be watchful! Be alert!” Advent is the season where we’re watchful for the Light of the World to come down to Earth, for the Word to become Flesh, for Hope to be restored. Winter, in its gloom and darkness, its withering away of leaves and flowers, makes us, I think, long for something more. For human contact, for something bigger, for something to thaw within and between us. In a similar way, this year seems to have been gloomy and dark for many of us. As of now, the much quoted adage that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism still mostly rings true. Especially as for many of us, this year indeed felt like the end of the world. We’re being watchful, waiting patiently for Mammon to be replaced with all that is good; something communal; something human; something True.

But there is more in it for us than being slaves to money until we die, and there is more than just being watchful and awaiting. There are times when we are to take action. Kropotkin, in Mutual Aid, wrote that “The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that it has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.”. Indeed, mutual aid and solidarity has found a way to grow and blossom through the arctic tundra that has been this year. Genuine solidarity and mutual aid, meeting people’s material needs and improving their conditions not in a top-down way but mutually, horizontally, is a radical alternative to the worship of the economy at the expense of human beings whose labour brings value to capital. In moments like this it is perhaps possible to envision a future beyond the current economic system. To quote Pope Francis in his timely encyclical Fratelli Tutti:

Once this health crisis passes, our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation. God willing, after all this, we will think no longer in terms of “them” and “those”, but only “us”. If only this may prove not to be just another tragedy of history from which we learned nothing. If only we might keep in mind all those elderly persons who died for lack of respirators, partly as a result of the dismantling, year after year, of healthcare systems. If only this immense sorrow may not prove useless, but enable us to take a step forward towards a new style of life. If only we might rediscover once for all that we need one another, and that in this way our human family can experience a rebirth, with all its faces, all its hands and all its voices, beyond the walls that we have erected.

*

It would be incumbent upon the ruling classes to remember that without human beings there is no such thing as an economy. But it is equally incumbent upon us not to let the current political-economic system – the current neoliberal order – steal our imagination. Even amongst the drudgery of life, the tundra of this Year of the Pandemic, and the desperate attempt to make ends meet, there has been an incredible impulse towards solidarity. In the depths of winter we found genuine care for one another and a sense of understanding that our futures are indeed inextricably tied together. It is only through that work, the work that starts on the ground and within our communities, that we can start to imagine a better future. It is true that we get to be watchful and that we ought to look forward patiently towards the Light, but it is equally true that we are called towards action and care for each other in the material world. This life might be a bitter sweet symphony, but when in our own lives and within our own community we refuse to let Mammon reign, refuse to deify the economy, and start building towards a world that ‘provides land, housing and work for all’, we move away from “capitalist realism” and towards a world where every human being’s life is truly inherently valuable rather than measured against productivity and the amount of use it has for Capital. That seems like a truly glorious start to this Christmas season.

I have, for a while now, been lamenting the decline of community. And, as far as I am in tune with the Zeitgeist, I reckon I am far from the only on who has. Indeed, this endless roaming, this frantic search for community, has manifested itself in different ways – many of which unsavoury – in society in the past five years (or arguably even longer). The answer seems to be searched for amongst the segments of the internet that have effectively radicalised young men, increasing nationalism manifest in Brexit and Donald Trump, in the addictive scrolling on the internet and its social media influencers, and endless consumption of new technology, clothing, and other commodities. At times one is overcome with confusion and cynicism and ends up, like Pontius Pilate, exclaiming ‘what is truth?’. But this is, in my opinion, not the answer.

Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party once exclaimed that ‘there is no alternative’ to market (neoliberal) capitalism. Perhaps complimentarily, she also stated that ‘there is no such thing as society’. These two adages, although perhaps not publicly endorsed with as much fervour as in the past, seem to have percolated through society as a whole – even decades later. To me, these two famous slogans embody the decline of community better than anything else; if there is no such thing as society, and there is no alternative to neoliberalism, then surely this system is what we have to do with, faults and all.

Many people have been suffering from depression and loneliness. We have seen an increasing atomisation of society, and an alienation from others, ourselves and our work. A constant need to compete with oneself, each other for jobs and social capital, and the system as a whole, has caused us to see each other less as fellow travellers and more like potential enemies. I am far from the first person to suggest that neoliberalism has caused this epidemic of loneliness and mental illness we have been living through, and I think this is something more and more people are taking seriously. These are the symptoms of the system.

We have seen an increasing atomisation of society and an alienation from others, ourselves and our work. A constant need to compete with oneself, each other for jobs and (social) capital, and the system as a whole, has caused us to see each other less as fellow travellers and more like potential enemies.

When it comes to offering diagnoses, the system itself will convince us to consume more and malevolent individuals and groups might point in the direction of immigration, open borders, and women. The former might push us to see Youtubers, celebrities and other ‘influencers’ as our friends and our community, whereas the latter might make us find solace in online forums and controversial ‘thinkers’. The symptoms are identified, but the diagnosis is made incorrectly.

The era of strong trade unions, a connection to places of worship, community service, free and open third spaces such as libraries, and perhaps even a closer relationship with one’s neighbours might have given us a sense of community. Certainly in The Netherlands religion and political affiliation used to be central to one’s personal identity and sense of community. The era of neoliberalism has eroded the power of trade unions in many ways, and many previously public third spaces have been privatised. Indeed, after the financial crash many people made the diagnosis that the system was failing, however we are currently still living in its final convulsion. The symptoms are identified, the consequences are seen, but many people are scared to make the correct diagnosis.

So what do I think is the correct diagnosis? And more importantly, what do we do to cure it? As I have tried to express in this piece, I believe neoliberal capitalism is part of the reason why there is a sense of loss and a very human search for community. Thatcher’s claim that ‘there is no alternative’ has been internalised so much that many would state that we just have to contend with the system, and that it is just ‘human nature’ to be competitive and atomised. I suggest that that is just a small part of the vastness that is ‘human nature’. In fact, we came so far as a species because of cooperation and altruism – is this not human nature too?

There is resistance in creating your own communities locally, and in serving these communities. This can be through volunteering, joining your trade unions, protesting, demonstrating, running for office or simply paying some attention to your neighbours and performing some acts of kindness to strangers. Will that overthrow the system? Probably not, but it shows not only that society exist, but also that there is indeed an alternative, and maybe, just maybe, it means that we find it within ourselves to band together and create that alternative. The system, after all, was not given to us by the Holy Spirit, but instead was created by humans. That means it can be changed by humans too. And looking at glimmers of hope in the world today, I think it will.