Philosophy and science

Mysticism and idealism is increasingly creeping into modern science, undermining the materialist outlook required to understand the world around us. And popular journal New Scientist is a particularly guilty offender of this pernicious trend.

We publish here the editorial by Alan Woods from the latest issue of the International Marxist Tendency’s quarterly theoretical journal, In Defence of Marxism. Subscribe today to get your copy of this vital weapon of Marxist theory.

In this extract from Wellred’s upcoming title ‘The History of Philosophy: A Marxist Perspective’, Alan Woods explains why Marxists must study the history of philosophy, and the enormous debt that Marxism owes to earlier thinkers.

Our latest educational series ‘The ABCs of Marxist philosophy’ is available now on podcast and YouTube. This unique resource is perfect for anyone who’s looking to get stuck into Marxist theory. Start listening and watching today!

The latest title from Wellred Books, The History of Philosophy: A Marxist Perspective, is out soon. This book is vital reading for any revolutionary who wishes to arm themselves with clear philosophical ideas that can change the world.

How do we acquire knowledge? Is there a real world beyond our senses? And if so, what is our relation to it? In this important theoretical contribution, Alan Woods mounts a defence of materialism against idealism and the obscurantist, postmodernist subjectivism popular on university campuses today.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born 250 years ago on 27 August 1770 in the German city of Stuttgart. A towering genius with an encyclopaedic mind, Hegel revolutionised every field that he dedicated himself to. The impact of Hegel’s ideas cannot be underestimated. As Marxists, we owe him a tremendous debt.

Revelations that Dominic Cummings sat on the government’s scientific advisory committee have raised question marks over just how ‘impartial’ expert advice is. Under capitalism, science will never be truly objective or independent.

Yesterday was the 160th anniversary of Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’. Albeit unconsciously, Darwin’s theory of evolution revealed how nature operates dialectically. This radically challenged the ideology of the ruling class.

Far from fuelling scientific progress, the profit motive and capitalist competition have become an enormous barrier to advancing humanity’s understanding of nature. Only a socialist plan can free science from these chains.

“All individual beings must perish, but the wonderful diversity of the material universe in all its myriad manifestations is eternal and indestructible. Life arises, passes away, and arises again and again. Thus it has been. Thus it will ever be.”

Martin Swayne reviews ‘Lost Connections’, an illuminating new book that examines the social factors and material causes behind the prevalence of mental health issues in modern day capitalist society.

Since the 1930s a dominant trend has existed within the scientific community that explains quantum mechanics with all kinds of idealistic and mystical interpretations. Now, however, unexpected discoveries in the field of fluid mechanics has the potential to reaffirm a dialectical and materialist explanation for these scientific phenomena.

In the final part of his series on the crisis of cosmology, Adam Booth looks at the more recent attempts to take the field of theoretical physics forward and explains the role that Marxism and the philosophy of dialectical materialism can play in guiding scientific research.

Continuing his series on the crisis of cosmology, Adam Booth analyses the philosophical problems at the heart of quantum mechanics and explains the problems facings scientists who are attempting to reconcile this theory with Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to create a “Theory of Everything”.

For many years now, storm clouds have been amassing on the horizon in the field of theoretical physics, with an accumulation of evidence and inconsistencies that bring the current cosmological models into question. In this article, Adam Booth explores and analyses the crisis in modern science from a Marxist perspective.

Marxism attaches great importance to the question of science. Here we see both the potential for human advance and the destructive grip of capitalism. In this article, adapted from the 2002 introduction to the German edition of Reason in Revolt, Alan Woods looks at how the ideas of Marxism relate to the most recent scientific developments and the crisis of capitalism.

Centuries of scientific research and investigation have helped to propel society forwards and improve the lives of millions. But, as with all other areas of society, the senility and decay of capitalism is now being reflected in the question of science also, and many are starting to worry about the reliability of research.

Karl Marx has been decried by mainstream economists and news outlets as dead, irrelevant and outdated. A new study published by the world’s most reputed scholarly journal, Nature, once again shows that, despite the hue and cry of naysayers and those who would revise history, his spectre cannot be exorcised.

Recent statements from Boris Johnson regarding “Cornflakes“ rising to the top of the packet with regard to natural intelligence are as stupid as claiming that you have a “Divine Right” to rule over the lower orders. Andy Fenwick examines the age-old debate about “nature” vs “nurture”; genes vs environment.

Quantum physics occupies a fascinating place at the cutting edge of modern scientific research, allowing today’s scientists to plumb new depths when it comes to matter and motion. Ben Gliniecki looks at a new book, Quantum Social Science, which argues that applying the logic of quantum theory to social systems can take our understanding of human society to a whole new level. Without realising it, these scientists are following in the footsteps of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, who developed the ideas of dialectical materialism.

To celebrate Ted Grant’s centenary year, we are re-publishing this chapter from the book ‘Reason in Revolt’ by Ted Grant and Alan Woods, which examines the role of philosophy in society and compares the materialist method of Marxism with the idealism of religion and other philosophy.

Alan Woods examines the revolutionary advances made by Marx in the field of philosophy.

What is moral and what is amoral in the struggle for the transformation of society? 75 years ago Leon Trotsky wrote his masterpiece Their Morals and Ours, in which he explained that morality is one of the key ideological components in the class struggle. Marie Frederiksen explores the question of Marxism and morality.

The theory of evolution represented a major revolution in modern science, forever changing how we view the natural world and our place within it. In this article, we look at how the theory of evolution has been developed since Darwin’s time, and the insights offered by the philosophy of Marxism.

A new documentary produced by the BBC, called ‘The Secret Life of Chaos’ (it has now been taken down from iPlayer, but can still be seen here: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/secret-life-chaos/ ) has attempted, with a degree of success, to reveal how the latest developments in science through ‘chaos theory’ are finally beginning to make redundant any religious explanation of the workings of the universe and the emergence of intelligent life.

November marks
the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. This book revolutionised
thinking about the living world because for the first time it provided an
explanation for the evolution of species, something that was long suspected by
scientists. Darwin’s
simple idea – change by natural selection
– is arguably the single most important foundation-stone upon which all modern
biology is based. The Origin of Species was
a triumph of the materialist world outlook, even if Darwin himself didn’t quite
put it that way, and for that reason its publication was celebrated by Marx and
Engels.

This interesting article by Stephen Jay Gould was originally written for Natural History in October 1976.

February 12th
2009 saw the 200th  anniversary Charles Darwin’s birth.. The
beautifully simple idea embodied in his most famous book, Origin of the Species – evolution
by natural selection – was a revolutionary departure with profound scientific
and philosophical implications. Following the
footsteps of Copernicus and Galileo three hundred years earlier, Darwin battered an
enormous, irreparable breech in the walls of Fortress Theology and for that
reason the book has been the source of intense debate right up to the present
day. Darwin
sought and found an explanation – a mechanism – for the evolutionary changes in
species, which other scientists were beginning to suspect, using a purely materialist method, without any recourse
to God or metaphysics.

Lukacs was an important influence on what is called ‘western Marxism’.
This was seen as a ‘humanist’ alternative to the dominant stalinist
orthodoxy of the inter-War period and later. One of Lukacs’ most
significant arguments was that (contrary to Engels) there can be no
dialectics of nature. Dan Morley examines the debate and goes into the
contradictory relationship between Lukacs’ interpretation of Marxism and
Stalinism.

During the 1980s
and 1990s, advances in chaos and complexity theory began to demonstrate a fact
understood more than a century and a half earlier by the founders of scientific
socialism, Marx and Engels, that systems which show an apparently high degree
of complexity or “design” do not require the hand of a creator but emerge naturally
from the apparently mundane interacting and contradictory forces at play inside
the system. It may come as a surprise to many then to find that in the field of
cosmology there are respected scientists groping towards the revival of the
mystical idea of intelligent design.

Trotsky’s ‘ABC of Materialist Dialectics’ is a brilliant short explanation of Marxist philosophy. It was written as part of a defence of Marxism against a middle-class revisionist tendency in the American Trotskyist movement in the late 1930s, which attempted to challenge its basic principles. As opposed to pragmatism and empiricism, Trotsky defended dialectical materialism as a richer, fuller, more comprehensive view of society and life in general.

Dialectical materialism is the revolutionary philosophy of Marxism. In this article, Rob Sewell explains this fundamental aspect of the Marxist method.

Dialectical materialism is the fundamental method of Marxism: a philosophy that seeks to analyse and explain the world due to the processes and material conditions in nature; a philosophy that seeks to explain change and motion. John Pickard provides an introduction to this revolutionary philosophy at the heart of Marxism.