Science & Socialism

The Trump administration has threatened funding to all US agencies that have contributed to the advancement of scientific understanding, while increasing the military budget by $54 billion.

The progress of science and reason has always depended upon the progress of society and social relations. Capitalism is a social system in which all human activity, including science, is subordinated to private profit and the nation-state system. Under capitalism, the advances in technology have served, not to feed the world's population, but to develop ever more destructive weapons of war. Yet science itself, the most international of human enterprises, develops through global collaboration.

The working class cannot advance without the aid of science. But science itself requires the advance of the working class, which will provide science with the necessary mass base in society. The progress of science—and the progress of humanity as a whole—depends on the resurgence of a new revolutionary movement of the working class. The socialist movement unites under its banner both the pursuit of scientific truth in all its forms and the struggle for human equality.