[P2P-F] Fwd: [NetworkedLabour] Science and the Working class Alexander Bogdanov 1918 translation by Fabian Tompsett, 1st October 2015

Sat Oct 31 05:59:13 CET 2015

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Örsan Şenalp <orsan1234 at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 1:22 AM
Subject: [NetworkedLabour] Science and the Working class Alexander Bogdanov
1918 translation by Fabian Tompsett, 1st October 2015
To: "networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org" <networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org
>

Brilliant work thid is Fabian, thanks a lot! Thought have to reproduce
the whole text so it vould be spread in email form as well.
Ps. Workin on a Turkish version for a while.
Orsan

Science and the Working class Alexander Bogdanov 1918

Preface to the English translation

This text is a summary of a presentation which Alexander Bogdanov
(1873-1928) gave at a conference for the Proletkult organisations of
Moscow, 23-28th February 1918. It was written during a period in which
Bogdanov was very active in Proletkult. Another version of his speech
was given at the First All-Russian Proletkult Conference held 15-20
September 1918, and was reprinted after this conference with 'Methods
of Labour and Methods of Cognition' which had previously appeared in
Пролетарская культура (Proletarian Culture) No. 4, August 1918. During
the summer of 1918, Bogdanov was involved in the founding of the
Communist University, founded 25th June 1918 Biggart et al, 1998). It
was a “higher education establishment conducting social and natural
scientific research” which in pursuit of its tasks “researched the
elaboration of questions of history, theory, and the practice of
socialism” (Bogdanov 1977). These experiences then feed into the
discussion at the September Conference where Bogdanov gave a speech on
the Workers' University. This was further elaborated in 'Proletarian
University' which appeared in No. 5 of Proletarian Culture which came
out in November 1918. This latter text is in preparation.

Fabian Tompsett, 1st October 2015 ORCID: 0000-0003-4793-1761 DOI:
10.13140/RG.2.1.4801.0725

This translation is released under a Creative Commons license. (CC BY-SA
3.0)

Science and the Working class

1. To say that the class character of science lies in defending the
interests of a given class, is just an argument of a pamphleteer or a
complete falsification. In reality, science may be bourgeois or
proletarian by its very "nature", including its origin, designs,
methods of study and presentation. In this fundamental sense, all the
sciences, social or otherwise, including mathematics and logic, may
and actually do have a class character.

2. The nature of science is to be organized collective experience of
humanity and the instrument of the organization of the life of
society. The ruling science in its various branches, is bourgeois
science: it has worked on all representatives of the bourgeois
intelligentsia, it is the concentrated material of the experience
accessible to the middle classes; they have understood their bourgeois
point of view and have made this generally understandable, they have
organised affairs according to their own processes and habits. It
follows that this science was used, then as now, an instrument of the
bourgeois structuring of society: firstly as an instrument of struggle
and victory of the bourgeoisie over the classes that had had their
day, and then as an instrument of their rule over the working class,
and at all times this organizational instrument for the development of
production has been realised under the leadership of the bourgeoisie.
Such is the organising strength of this science which at the same time
displays its historic narrowness.

3. This narrowness is already being felt in the very material of
science, that is to say in the content of experience it organises;
this is especially so in the social sciences. Thus, in the study of
relations of production, bourgeois science could not grasp or to
distinguish the particular higher form, of collectivist fraternal
cooperation, because this form is virtually unknown to the bourgeois
classes. Even more significant is the narrowness of this fundamental
perspective which is evident across the whole of bourgeois science and
which is due to the same position of the bourgeois classes in the
social system, including their way of life. This special feature is
the split between science and its real basis: socialised labour.

4. The separation between mental and physical labor mark the origin of
this rupture. In itself, this does not exclude the consciousness of
the indissoluble connection of practice and theory in the social
process into a single whole. But none of the bourgeois classes can
perceive this; it is outside their field of vision. These classes are
educated in the individualised economy, private property, and the
competition of the market; that is why the citizens have an
individualistic consciousness and the social nature of science is
incomprehensible to them. For them, science is not a collective
experience of organized labor nor an organizational instrument of
collective work; for them, knowledge is something in itself, even
something opposed to practice, with a special “ideal”, "logical"
nature, and if in their view it should lead to some practical outcome,
they attribute this precisely to this higher nature, and not because
it has arisen from any practice which may have shaped it. This
particular fetish that can be named the "fetishism of abstract
knowledge."

5. Even as specialization grew, the bourgeois world was developing all
areas of its creation, science in particular. Science is split into an
ever larger number of branches, increasingly divergent, always
weakening the living relationship that existed between them. The
individualistic separation of men sharpened this process because
although the pooling of ideas is still a need for specialists working
in the same industry, this necessity is relatively less compelling for
specialists working in different branches. This path led Science to a
disparate constitution, similar to that of capitalist society itself,
and to extend this comparison, its development follows the same
anarchy.

This is the result: it has accumulated in all its branches an enormous
wealth of material and also a wealth of methods for shaping this
material. However, bourgeois science has been unable to achieve full,
systematic and harmonious organisation. Each specialty has created
their own language that has become incomprehensible not only the broad
masses but even to scholars of another specialty. The same
correlations, the same experimental links, the same processes of
knowledge are studied in different branches, as if it were quite
different things. The methods of one branch only share knowledge with
other branches with much delay and difficulty. This is the origin of
the narrow horizon, the corporatist narrowness that develops in men of
science, weakening and slowing their creation.

6. Also as much as science has given a unity for technical methods,
the development of mechanised production has also sparked a trend in
science to unify methods, to overcome the harmful aspects of
specialization. Much has been done in this direction, but in the
meantime, the radical rupture between the individual branches of
science remains. So far, this trend to unification may only impact on
the details, but it can not lead to harmonisation in a single
organization of science as a whole.

7. Bourgeois science is not very accessible to the working class; it
is dense, its specialized corporatist language is obscure and
complicated, and further, as it is of course become a product in
capitalist society, it's expensive. If isolated proletarian
representatives, at the cost of enormous expenditure of energy, become
masters of one or the other of its branches, its class character is
then felt: as they are cut from the collective working, they commit to
a path of rupture with the life, the interests and thought structure
of the working community from which they come. The corporatist
narrowness doubles here the tendency towards an intellectual
aristocracy. In a word, as a bourgeois ideology (1) , from its origin,
science organizes the soul of the proletariat according to a bourgeois
model.

8. All this gives to the working class specific missions concerning
contemporary science:
▪ we must review it from a proletarian point of view, in content as
much as form of presentation;
▪ the creation of a new organization, as much for the elaboration as
for the dissemination amongst the working masses. In most branches of
science, accomplishing these tasks will mean a methodical
consideration of the legacy of the old world. But in some, a large and
deep autonomous creation will be required.

9. The review of the content of science must first annul this break
with collective working practices: the material of science must be
understood and informed as the practical experience of humanity; the
schemas, conclusions, formulas must be seen as tools for organizing
all the social practice of humanity. At the moment, this work is done
almost exclusively in the social sciences, but with insufficient
structure and method; it must be extended to all areas of knowledge.
This transformation produces a science vitally close to the working
class:
▪ Astronomy as the science bringing together the work activity in time and
space
▪ Physics as the science of the resistances encountered by the
collective work of humanity
▪ Physiology as the science of the labor force, logic as a theory the
social agreement of ideas.
That is to say, such organizational tools of work will penetrate into
the consciousness of the proletariat more immediately, more easily and
more deeply than those same sciences in their present form.

10. It is further necessary to do everything possible to eliminate the
disparate nature of science that has led to the increase of
specialisation; the unity of scientific language most be the
objective, matching and generalising the methods of the various
branches of knowledge, not only in relation to each other, but as
regards the methods of all other areas of practice, developing of a
complete monism of them all. It will be embodied in the universal
organizational science necessary for the proletariat, the future
organizer of the whole life of mankind in all its aspects.

11. With regard to the forms of the presentation of science, it is
slightly easier, without prejudice to the essence of what is
presented. Recently, the work of the democratisers of science (2) has
shown how it is possible to advance in this direction, whether as
regards the usual presentations of the useless scholastic hodgepodge
or by repeating the same thing under different names in neighbouring
branches. Simplification has already reached a sufficient degree for a
single review of science from the viewpoint of collective of work
which will release science from the abstract fetishism which is a
source of the pseudo-problems and unnecessary devices which were often
the subject of 'evidence' in the old mathematics, mechanics or logic,
etc.

12. The review of the content and of the transformation of the
external form of science will constitute its basis, that is to say its
"socialism", its mode of adaptation to the tasks of the struggle and
socialist construction. The dissemination of knowledge and scientific
work must be organised in parallel. The two things are inextricably
linked: they must be embodied in life in terms of the Workers'
University and Workers' Encyclopedia.

13. The Workers' University shall consist of a system of cultural and
educational institutions with levels which converge to a single centre
for training and organization of scientific forces. At each level of
the system, the general education courses must be complemented by
practical, technical and scientific courses, of use to society. The
unifying of principle of programmes at each level and their
complementary teachings should not hinder the freedom to try to
perfect the particular programs or particular teaching methods. The
basic characteristic of the relationships between teachers and
students should be fraternal co-operation, in which the competence of
the former does not become sovereign authority nor the reliance of the
latter engendering passivity and the absence of criticism. Education
must primarily contain the assimilation of methods.

14. The development of the courses, and in conjunction with this, the
work of publication of scientific workers in the Labour University,
should be geared towards the creation of a Workers' Encyclopedia which
should not be a mere summary of scientific findings, but above all a
complete, harmoniously system which presents the methods of practice
and knowledge in their vital links.

-------------------------------
(1) “Our usual ideas about the social relations between people imply
mutual understanding as their first precondition. (…) What is the
essence of this mutual understanding? It is contained in a common
language and the sum of concepts which are expressed by this language,
in what is called common “culture” or, more exactly, ideology”
Bogdanov's Tektology Book I (Bogdanov 1996)
(2) As an example of such democratisers see John Dewey (1859-1952),
Ernst Mach (1883-1916) and Yakov Perelmann (1882-1942). Perelman was
influenced by Mach and probably Bogdanov as well (Siemsen 2010).

Translators Notes
This English translation was made using 'Science et la class
ouvrière', the French translation by Blanche Grinbaum of 'Nauki I
rabochii klass', which appeared in La science, l'art et la class
ouvriere (1977). Additional contextual information was gleaned from
Bogdanov and His Work (Biggart et al. 1998), which provides a
comprehensive list of Bogdanov's published works and archival
holdings. The French book cites the piece as coming from Пролетарская
культура (Proletarian Culture) No. 2, however Biggart et al suggest it
was published several places elsewhere (ibid pp. 315-6).
Gender specific terms have been rendered in a gender free way (e.g.
“humanity” for “man”) for ease of reading rather than to mask the
gendered language used. Footnotes have also been added for ease of
comprehension for a modern readership. Minor formatting changes have
been made from the French version.
This translation is part of ongoing research into Bogdanov and his
relevance in the twenty-first century.

Title Image:
Vier Männer vor Fabriken (1926) by Franz Seiwert (1894-1933) Seiwert
participated in the discussion about Proletkult in the pages of Die
Aktion in the early 1920s. This painting is currently in the Hamburg
Kunsthalle. (Bohnen 1978)

Bibliography

Biggart J., Gloveli G., Yassour A., (1998) Bogdanov and His Work: A
Guide to the Published and Unpublished Works of Alexander A. Bogdanov
(Malinovsky) 1873-1928 Aldershot: Ashgate

Bogdanov A. (1977) La science, l'art et la classe ouvrière, trans.
Blanche Grinbaum, eds. Dominique Lecourt and Henri Deluy, Paris:
Maspero

Bogdanov A. (1996) Bogdanov's Tektology Book I translated by tr.
Andrei Kartashov, Vladimir Kelle, Peter Bystrov, ed Dudley P., Hull:
Centre for Systems Studies

Bohnen U. (1978) Franz W. Seiwert 1894–1933. Leben und Werk. Köln :
Kölnischer Kunstverein

Siemsen, H. (2010) 'Mach’s Science Education, the PISA Study and Czech
Science Education' in: Ernst Mach – Fyzika – Filosofie –
Vzděláváni. Vol. 1 Brno: Masarykova Univerzita, 2010, pp. 255–265,
DOI: 10.5817/CZ.MUNI.M210-4808-2011-255.
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