One of my favourite theorists is the Marxist evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin. In books like The Dialectical Biologist and Biology as Ideology, he studied the dialectic between organism and environment to understand biology in its wider context. The role of a Marxist scientist is to be anti-Cartesian, pushing for a broader intersectional understanding of a subject with the intent of changing something through political means instead of reductively isolating things until they reinforce existing power structures. My horticulture and socioecology work is doing Marxist geography with plants that I understand through Marxist ethics/biology. Nature is the proof of dialectics and each plant is nothing but internal and external dialectics across spacetime. The praxis of the work is creating the most scientifically valid space that achieves the greatest socioecological mission over time, transforming the city’s greenspace in line with my Marxist urbanism, art theory, and pedagogy views. Nothing has been more important for my work than a formal and applied understanding of dialectical materialism.
Started reading The Dialectical Biologist just from the name just because I studied biology and seeing the name was like “probably the book I should have been aware of 20 years ago” and oh my god this thing is a banger!
Only read the intro so far and:
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.
This is also 100% relevant to the thesis I am writing right now in a completely different field. It’s directly useful for the argument I am working on.
It’s the best framework I’ve found for Marxist scientific philosophy. I’m not good enough at mathematics to thrive in a lab, but I can absorb interdisciplinary theory to spot contradictions and resolve them. Science becomes a holistic feedback loop driving community and ecological participation/wellbeing, creating the conditions for others to do natural experiments instead of just passively observing and classifying. The revolutionary project tied to it brings a moral and ethical framework that can’t be corrupted in the ways bourgeois science is.
One of my favourite theorists is the Marxist evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin. In books like The Dialectical Biologist and Biology as Ideology, he studied the dialectic between organism and environment to understand biology in its wider context. The role of a Marxist scientist is to be anti-Cartesian, pushing for a broader intersectional understanding of a subject with the intent of changing something through political means instead of reductively isolating things until they reinforce existing power structures. My horticulture and socioecology work is doing Marxist geography with plants that I understand through Marxist ethics/biology. Nature is the proof of dialectics and each plant is nothing but internal and external dialectics across spacetime. The praxis of the work is creating the most scientifically valid space that achieves the greatest socioecological mission over time, transforming the city’s greenspace in line with my Marxist urbanism, art theory, and pedagogy views. Nothing has been more important for my work than a formal and applied understanding of dialectical materialism.
Started reading The Dialectical Biologist just from the name just because I studied biology and seeing the name was like “probably the book I should have been aware of 20 years ago” and oh my god this thing is a banger!
Only read the intro so far and:
This is also 100% relevant to the thesis I am writing right now in a completely different field. It’s directly useful for the argument I am working on.
Thank you for making me aware of this!
Shitttttt I was coming to make the exact same book recommendation and a similar comment. You’re a good badger
It’s the best framework I’ve found for Marxist scientific philosophy. I’m not good enough at mathematics to thrive in a lab, but I can absorb interdisciplinary theory to spot contradictions and resolve them. Science becomes a holistic feedback loop driving community and ecological participation/wellbeing, creating the conditions for others to do natural experiments instead of just passively observing and classifying. The revolutionary project tied to it brings a moral and ethical framework that can’t be corrupted in the ways bourgeois science is.