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This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter.
Prabir Purkayastha, founding editor of Newsclick.in explains, Why We Need to Adopt Friedrich Engels’ Thinking on Science in These Times.
Science and Technology and Their Influence on Society
Photo: LA Progressive
Reflecting on the contributions of Friedrich Engels on his bicentenary brings three issues to mind. The first issue is, how do we read his writings today? A lot of his writings were polemics against defenders of the existing order, or those proposing theories that ran counter to Marx and Engels’ views on the struggles of the working class for a new and just society.
To understand this point, we have to consider what Engels was writing against, as those figures, such as Dühring, live on only because of Engels’ Anti-Dühring. The second problem is the language of the text. It is written for its time (and space) and, therefore, takes for granted much of what we may not be aware of today.
The third problem is that when it comes to science, we barely recognize the terrain about which Engels was writing. The subject matter—the sciences—have moved far away from Engels’ times.
So why do we need to plow through polemical texts of Marx and Engels, written against people whose writings have otherwise been forgotten?...
Similarly, the history of technology, its relationship with science and production, becomes clear when we look at the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of what advanced capitalist countries can do if their economies are threatened, as opposed to when infectious diseases are only a problem of the poorer countries.
Will this automatically lead to people realizing the relationship between capital, profits and public health? Not unless we can bring our understanding to the people through a larger people’s science movement; or a people’s health movement. And for that, we need to enter the larger scientific community.
This is where Engels and his materialist dialectics becomes important to us.
Source: LA Progressive
