This is the first installment of a four part essay serialized in the MagMa. It contains the following parts: 

1. Science and Class Society
2. The Military-​Academic-​Industrial-​Medico-​Scientific Complex (MAIMS)
3. Virology as Ideology
4. Their Science and Our Science

Introduction

»The human body is mortal by nature. Hence illnesses are inevitable. Why does a man only go to the doctor when he is ill, and not when he is well? Because not only the illness, but even the doctor is an evil. Under constant medical tutelage, life would be regarded as an evil and the human body as an object for treatment by medical institutions. Is not death more desirable than life that is a mere preventive measure against death? Does not life involve also free movement? What is any illness except life that is hampered in its freedom? A perpetual physician would be an illness in which one would not even have the prospect of dying, but only of living. Let life die; death must not live. Has not the spirit more right than the body?«

Karl Marx, On Freedom of the Press, Chapter 4, 1842

For three years we have lived under the constant tutelage, not merely of medicine, but also its handmaiden, science – or more properly, The Science. »Follow the science,« was the command, endlessly repeated. Practically speaking, this meant: follow the dictates of politicians, pundits, and public-​health bureaucrats, because, of course, they act only upon the purest wisdom divulged by the science. We have had, of course, no grounds to question them, because that would amount to questioning science itself.^[1]

What is the science? To discover it, all one must do is »listen to the experts.« Who are the experts? Judging by media appearances and political advisory committees, one characteristic they all appear to share is an overwhelming material stake in the pharmaceutical industry and for-​profit healthcare. They are generally either 1) directly employed or themselves the owners of one or more pharmaceutical concerns 2) involved in the public health apparatus of a capitalist government, in either a research or regulatory capacity or 3) hold a position at a major research university or hospital.

The most cited experts indeed appear to occupy all three positions across the course of their career. In the (very similarly structured and often overlapping) spheres of the military-​industrial complex, or banking and financial regulation, this kind of turnover is often criticized as a revolving door breeding corruption. In public health and scientific research, however, it presumably functions more like a centrifuge, and this rapid circulation ensures nothing but the perfect purity of our scientific experts.

The organized Marxist parties have by and large accepted just such a naive, idealist picture of science. They have regurgitated and agitated for the lethal application of ruling class ideology, in the unambiguous service of ruling-​class interests, simply because it has called itself ›science.‹ Under this banner they have permitted or even abetted an unprecedented assault on the global working class. By all indications, they have forgotten how many instances of pseudoscience concocted by the ruling class and its servants have had the imprimatur of science in the past, and the near universal approval of relevant ›experts‹ – such as Malthusianism, raciology, phrenology, lobotomies, or, indeed, ›political-​economy,‹ that ›science‹ which Marx’s Capital so devastatingly exposed and refuted.

More profoundly, they have lost sight of what a very rare thing science is. Most ruling classes, in most historical human societies, have found its benefits far outweighed by its radical potential to undermine their rule, and have stifled it. What is necessary now is a real historical-​materialist perspective that takes seriously the prospect that we can and have regressed, especially since the global counter revolution, into a less scientific society, despite trappings which suggest otherwise. As Molly Klein has remarked, there was something very precise in Marshall MacLuhan’s famous description of the modern world as a global village, rather than, say, a city: while late-​capitalist modernity has been technically sophisticated on the one hand, socially it has become progressively more backwards, tribal, narrow-​minded, and superstitious. Kary Mullis, who received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing the PCR technique upon which the entire Covid edifice rests, observed that »years from now, people looking back at us will find our acceptance of the HIV theory of AIDS as silly as we find the leaders who excommunicated Galileo, just because he insisted that the earth was not the center of the universe.«^[2] Mullis was too optimistic.

This essay will implore you to consider the proposition that modern virology and indeed much of modern medical science more generally, as it has been practiced in the 20th and 21st centuries, is not only just as unmoored from objective reality, but also just as effective and monstrous a vehicle for the most sinister ruling class ambitions, as were the racial theories which justified colonialism and imperialism, slavery and fascism. It will highlight virology’s internal contradictions, the fraudulence of its established protocols, and the various and interlocking ways in which it has served as a central legitimating ideology for exploitative class society.

This project began as a straightforward book review of Virus Mania by Engelbrecht et al., with the aim of bringing the arguments and evidence they put forth to the attention of a wider audience, particularly on the left. It became clear, however, that the barriers which many have erected to engaging with these materials are very awesome indeed. So this essay will begin (Parts 1 and 2) with an attempt to make the simple, logical and historical argument for why one must handle mainstream science skeptically, all the more so in the conditions under which it is currently produced. Indeed, a truly rigorous Marxist approach dictates an extreme skepticism of the entire modern medical-​scientific apparatus of late imperialist monopoly capitalism.

In Part 3, it will present the case against virology, particularly as articulated by Engelbrecht et al., but also informed by the output of a growing body of skeptics who have been united and galvanized by the last three years. Unfortunately, and precisely because this body of thought has been so effectively quarantined from the Marxist left, criticisms of virology have largely been formulated in a fashion which can be as flawed and undialectical as mainstream virology itself. They are often marked by characteristically petty-​bourgeois deviations either towards extreme positivism, or a naïve (frequently religiously grounded) holism or idealism. The hope, however, is that precisely through this essay, the nonetheless profound and damning critiques of virology which have been made so far will be themselves taken up, criticized, and integrated into a properly scientific, historical-​materialist account.

Finally, in Part 4 this essay will explore the particular evolution of virology – and medical science generally – in the context of global counter-​revolution which I tried to provide a very schematic sketch of in »Imperialism Today is Conspiracy Praxis.«^[3] As that essay was hardly more than a gesture in the direction towards a corrected program of research, so too will it be possible in this paper to give little more than a survey of the rich and extensive heterodox bodies of thought on modern medicine and science which Marxists ignore at their peril. These contentions will no doubt seem absurd and risible, even to many who have profound doubts about the dominant narratives regarding the past three years of ›pandemia‹ in which we have lived. I would simply implore you to recall that not only the major pseudosciences of the past, but millennia of religious doctrines before them, appeared just as unassailable and self-​evident as virology may appear to us today. De omnibus dubitandum!

Part 1: Science and Class Society

Science and Ideology

»Science is the belief in the ignorance of Experts.

When someone says, ›Science teaches such and such,‹ he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, ›science has shown such and such,‹ you might ask, ›How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?‹

It should not be ›science has shown‹ but ›this experiment, this effect, has shown.‹ And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments – but be patient and listen to all the evidence – to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.«

Richard Feynman ^[4]

In his series of Massey Lectures, »Biology as Ideology,« Richard Lewontin argued that science has two core functions: one is to offer techniques to manipulate the world; the other is to explain the world. In explaining the world, science plays a very important, yet underappreciated role as an institution of social legitimation.

For the ruling class, who determine the allocation of resources in our society– which research projects get funded or not, which information gets published or suppressed, what practises or therapies are encouraged or sanctioned – these two core utilities must be constantly weighed and balanced. For of course, the better one understands the world, the easier it is to rule. Except of course when that understanding is both subversive and difficult to contain. As Richard Levins put it, the »basic strategic problem for the owners of science: they need innovation … without the scepticism and the iconoclasm of the enlightenment,« that is to say, they need a »bourgeois revolution in science, but not in culture.«^[5]

All Marxists recognize that capitalism was at first an object of rigorous study by capitalists and their dependents, who needed to make sense of the mode of production they had conjured up. Yet the clearer a picture they permitted to be produced, the greater the danger to themselves which that very analysis posed. Thus as David Fernbach, translator of Capital, observed, »after 1830 the irrepressible fact of the class struggle of the industrial workers led bourgeois economics to retreat from its own previous scientific discoveries, and to the rise of vulgar economics.«^[6] So Marx’s project in Capital was, as the full title emphasized, »a critique of political economy.« In it Marx showed that that body of thought, which presented itself as a science and was understood as such, was in fact chiefly a means of obfuscating reality to justify and defend capitalist rule. Above all, political-​economy made the wealth produced by workers and appropriated by the capitalists, to appear as the product of the capitalist himself (generated thanks to his particular ingenuity, abstinence, etc.). Indeed, though the term ›political economy‹ is now often curiously misused by Marxisant academics to signal that they are advancing a more holistic approach to some issue, the term in Marx’s time simply referred to that body of bourgeois (pseudo)science which is now called economics.

Put simply, scientific theories have use-​value for the ruling class not in merely enabling them to manipulate the world, but also in enabling them to manipulate others – to convince them that the current order of things is justifiable, or at the very least inevitable. In this respect science functions as an ideology. Lewontin argues that, with the demotion of Christianity following the French Revolution, biological determinism took over as the most crucial legitimating ideology of capitalist class rule. Indeed, it is noteworthy to observe that inchoate forms of the Darwinian ›doctrine of DNA‹ emerged even before Darwin’s specific theories were established. Nineteenth century literature, from Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, to Dickens’ Oliver Twist, to Zola’s Rougon-​Macquart cycle, is suffused with the notion that »blood will tell.«^[7] Emily Bronte’s notebooks indeed reveal a proto-​Darwinian framework developed independently of Darwin.

In brief, one may summarize the historic problem of the bourgeoisie which was resolved by this ideology as follows: the bourgeoisie was, numerically, far too small to directly overthrow the Ancien Regime. The balance of power between them and the traditional feudal ruling class produced conditions which enabled absolutist regimes to develop unprecedented autonomy. In these circumstances, the ideology of liberalism emerged. This body of thought, generated largely by the urban petty-​bourgeois, allowed the ultimate ascent of the bourgeoise by forging a coalition out of the urban professionals, merchants, and broad swaths of the working masses – especially artisans and urban wage workers.

The author discusses his views in the above podcast from »What’s Left?«

However, once the bourgeoisie seized power, they very quickly found that sword of liberalism forged in the battle with the aristocracy to be pointed at themselves. They needed a means to justify the persistence of economic hierarchy once aristocratic birthright had been abolished. Biology, especially in its more virulent ideological forms– eugenics, social Darwinism, phrenology– served just this purpose. It allowed the argument to be made for a form of natural inequality. Once the ›artificial‹ constraints of feudalism were removed, the inequalities that persisted were the inevitable manifestations of inherent, innate, and unchangeable inequality, dictated by blood. This was used, obviously, not only to rationalize inequality within but also across societies, and formed the foundation of racist ideologies justifying slavery and colonialism. This sediment which formed the very bedrock of capitalist order was also the ground of the more radical and sinister theories which animated and justified fascism.

That modern biology was useful in this way to the ruling class does not mean it was simply useless to humanity at large. That untruths could be fashioned by a biology industry does not mean that this historic industry was only capable of producing malign nonsense, or that it was simply a manifestation of ruling class power. On the contrary, natural sciences practiced by bourgeois institutions were capable of convincing experienced masses with falsehoods precisely because of the basic legitimacy of the methods of its investigations and the long and constantly accumulating record of important and valid knowledge thereby disclosed; bourgeois science had as its principle motive the actual, reliable and profitable mastery of the concrete world; the methods and resources of scientific inquiry were regulated and stimulated towards accuracy by the very real impetus to optimally exploit the given planet, its flora, fauna, minerals and all other substances, including of course human beings. Like all historical human endeavors since class emerged, natural science in the capitalist era was a site of struggle. Nonetheless, we must appreciate the fact that it was from the start inextricable from and deeply constrained by the interests of the class whose ascendance ushered it forth.

The tremendous victory of the global working class, however partial, in defeating Nazism in WWII temporarily quieted the more vocal purveyors of ruling class pseudoscience in the arena of human biology, but because the root – capitalist inequality – was not exterminated, its recrudescence was inevitable. As Molly Klein has observed, the utter discrediting – by professionals in the natural and human sciences as well as by the consciousness of the masses of humanity – of all such inquiries, ruling class vanguard institutions like Harvard & the Rockefeller foundation continued throughout the post-​war 20th century to throw money at anyone purporting to have discovered some evidence of either a white or black biological race in humanity, and funding was always available for the always futile quest for proof of the biological heritability of laziness, violence and virtue. But for a time, a functional standard of maximizing objectivity, and a democratic political consensus regarding the ethics and utility of scientific practice in natural science, were maintained. Supported by the radical social movements of the 60s and 70s, the likes of Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould waged an admirable struggle against restive pseudoscientific reaction in the forms of biological determinism, sociobiology, evo-​psych and so forth.

Since the global counter-​revolution which set in with the defeat of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, this sort of fascist pseudoscience has become predominant, at least in the public sphere. With the extreme concentration and consolidation of the ruling class since the neoliberal era at least, we have every reason to believe that the rift which always existed between public and secret science has reached unprecedented proportions. As Klein has argued, we live under conditions in which there is probably much very good science being done covertly or semi-​covertly for the ruling class, coupled with increasingly superstitious, pseudoscientific stories and rationales for masking it, disseminated in the form of commercial science and technology.^[8] Nothing could be more illustrative of the latter than the absolute ascent of virology.

Virology as Ideology

On profound philosophical levels, virology is consonant with and arises out of the fundamental impulses of bourgeois ideology. It furthers the atomistic view which seeks for singular mechanistic causes, and elides the importance of environmental or synergistic processes. It maintains the fixation on genetic material as a core agent, and is in some sense, an extreme reification of the bourgeoisie’s conception of DNA (or, derivatively, RNA) as, in Dawkins’ words, driving us as if we were »gigantic lumbering robots« manipulated »by remote control.« As Lewontin observed:

»It’s usually said that genes make proteins, and that genes are self-​replicating. But in fact genes can make nothing. A protein is made by a complex system of chemical production involving other proteins using the particular sequence of nucleotides in a gene to determine the exact formula for the protein being manufactured. Sometimes the gene is said to be the blueprint for a protein or the source of information for developing a protein. As such it’s seen as more important than the mere manufacturing machinery. Yet of course, proteins cannot be manufactured without both the gene and the rest of the machinery. Neither is more important. Isolating the gene as the so-​called master molecule is another unconscious ideological commitment, one that places brains above brawn, mental work as superior to mere physical work, information as higher than action. Nor are genes self-​replicating. They cannot make more of themselves, any more than they can make a protein. Genes are made by a complex machinery of proteins, which uses the genes as the model for more genes. By referring to genes as self-​replicating, they are endowed with a mysterious autonomous power which seems to place them above the more ordinary materials of the body. Yet if anything in the world can be said to be self-​replicating, it’s not the gene, but the entire organism as a complex system.« ^[9]

Virology is in some sense an even more fanatical permutation of this ideological predisposition, the elevation of genes to pure agents.

Naturally, they are not conceived as collective or social agents either. On the contrary, virology further fits the Hobbesian-​Darwinian picture of nature as hostile and purely competitive, a world of attackers, invaders, and hostile (cellular) takeovers. It is, indeed, a refracted image of the history of capital itself: over the past half milenia, capital has progressively insinuated itself into the self-​reproduction processes of various social bodies, and subordinated them to its one and only goal: the reproduction and propagation of itself. The field that was once sown to sustain peasants, their lord, and his retainers, is now sowed with only one consideration in mind: maximal returns from exchange on the market, with which to obtain more capital, to once again reinvest on an ever greater scale. Just so, we are told, viruses commandeer the body’s means of (re)production on a cellular level, hijacking them for their insatiable drive to reproduce. Thus, as in so many other respects, science bears the stamp of the mode of production under which it is produced.

At its core, virology follows a sort of crude syllogism, which is almost a parody of the atomistic worldview. Parasites were long known to spread from host to host and to cause disease. With technical advances, bacteria were discovered, which like parasites were capable of spreading and causing diseases, but were much smaller. This framework for disease was very attractive and soon became the default for understanding as many ailments as possible, for reasons which will be discussed below. So in those instances where a disease could be construed as transmissible, but for which no parasite or bacteria could be found, there must also be a pathogen, only yet smaller still. It is worth noting that virology essentially hinged on such presumptions and firmly established itself before technology such as electron microscopes developed which actually enabled us to ›see‹ supposed viruses or confirm their existence.

Most significantly in our current moment, Virology has been one of the most powerful means of exculpating the ruling class from the wretchedness of the circumstances which they impose on the mass of the population. The true causes of the vast majority of supposedly viral illness– and this is implicitly recognized even by many mainstream virologists, who believe such conditions generate vulnerability to infection – are the simple, artificial consequences of class society, from malnutrition to poisoning.

The latter is perhaps the least well understood. Virology has worked as a general means for shifting the blame for illness from those who overwork, poison, and starve us onto a (prior to this year, generally understood as) uncontrollable force of nature. But it has also almost certainly been used in a much more targeted and conscious fashion. As Catherine Austin Fitts has glossed:

»A toxin creates a disease. The toxin might be pesticides or industrial pollution or wireless technology radiation. The toxin damages millions of people and their communities. Companies or their insurance provider may be liable for civil or criminal violations. Then a virus is blamed. A ›cure‹ is found in a ›vaccine.‹ The pesticide or other toxic exposure is halted just as the vaccine is introduced, and presto, the sickness goes away. The vaccine is declared a success, and the inventor is declared a hero. A potential financial catastrophe has been converted to a profit, including for investors and pension funds.«^[10]

As will be shown below, this sort of scheme, while perhaps oversimplifying in some respects, was almost certainly employed– consciously, deliberately, conspiratorially – with Polio in order to cover-​up widespread DDT poisoning. ^[11]

Most significantly now, virology serves as an awesome justification for widespread social control and surveillance. Arguably, this has been most powerfully advanced of late by a sort of inversion of the traditional virological ideology, which has culminated in the current global regime. In brief, as traced above, a core ideological benefit of virology has traditionally been to displace responsibility for sickness and death away from the illness-​inducing social conditions imposed by the ruling class – from overwork, from environmental poisoning, from addiction to drugs or refined sugars or other poison commodities, from stress and anxiety, from malnutrition, from isolation, from depression, from rage and grief, in short, from capitalism– onto an anonymous and uncontrollable force of nature.

The corona program has seized upon and inverted this formulation into an even more pernicious justification for an even more audacious program: the ruling class has cannily taken upon itself the responsibility to control that force, thus appropriating for itself the right to expand its legitimate field of operations into the deepest recesses of our cells. Just in the same way, the ruling class is currently leveraging its own long term degradation of the natural world. Through the ›Green New Deal‹ and associated programs, the ruling class propose to rectify their own past criminality by internalizing negative externalities. Elements of the natural world previously not recognized as anyone’s property (or, what amounts to the same, recognized as everyone’s) will soon be recognized as assets (of course, protected by goodly governments or NGOs who want only to protect them for us). This transparent swindle to enclose and privatize every last inch of the earth not already so controlled, under the color of writing their own past wrongs, is a characteristic maneuver of the current ruling class, whose vanguard arises out of the nexus of high finance and intelligence operations.^[12]

However, the political and economic details of the currently ongoing global transformation are beyond the scope of this inquiry. It is sufficient to note here the profound appeal, on multiple levels, which the ideology of virology presents for the ruling class, irrespective of its evidentiary basis. One might suggest that had viruses not existed, it would have been very beneficial indeed for the ruling class to invent them. Indeed, in the virtual, computerized world into which they are herding us, they did just that.

Too Big to be False?

One might admit that certain elements of virology are either emphasized or suppressed in the interest of the ruling class, or that it may be constrained by certain conceptual blinders – but that an entire, vast and long developed field of science could err in its fundamental premises: this seems inconceivable. Yet here history is instructive.

Very few believe the precepts of more than one major religion, which is to say that nearly everyone acknowledges that most, if not all, religions are fundamentally false in their foundations. Yet people have toiled under their immense complex of illusions for centuries. They have followed their dicates. They have filled libraries elaborating the family trees of deities, the theological nuances of spirits’ interrelations, the minutest species of supernatural phenomena. They have felt, deeply and viscerally, their convictions confirmed: they have been addressed by their god(s), or have seen their hand at work in their lives and the lives of others; they have rejoiced in miracles, or castigated themselves for justly earned punishments.

It simply cannot be the case that the persistence, or scale, or complexity of a belief system proves that it cannot be fundamentally false. Nor can even, necessarily, the strongly felt conviction that one has perceived its workings. You may have ›caught‹ a cold, feel you know exactly who gave it to you, etc. – you are no different in this respect than the very many who were sure they ›caught‹ scurvy when it was widely believed to be infectious, nor the peasant who knew he had been cursed.

Of course, one may rejoin here that the conflation of science with religion is a cheap and sophomoric cynicism. Science entails a rigorous methodology which differentiates it from religion. Yet as Lewontin observed

»Science consists not simply of a collection of true facts about the world, but is a collection of assertions and theories made by people who call themselves scientists. It consists in large part in what scientists say about the world, whatever the true state of the world might be. Science is not simply an institution devoted to the manipulation of the physical world. It also has as a function the formation of peoples’ consciousness about the political and social world.« ^[13]

We risk descending into semantics, in trying to differentiate science from that which calls itself science. It should be uncontroversial, however, to insist that the latter is not always the former. A core contention of this essay is that in important ways the modern field of virology is based on principles and practices which are not consistent with the scientific method as generally understood. And that the self-​auditing mechanisms which supposedly maintain the integrity of science – above all, the peer review system– have proved incapable of redressing this. Indeed, we will suggest that in a class society with an unequal distribution of wealth as radical as our own, it is impossible for a peer-​review system to function adequately.^[14]

This is not simply an issue of a renegade field falsely claiming for itself the mantle of science independently of the legitimate body. Indeed, it is widely accepted that there are numerous historical instances of pseudosciences which were widely recognized as science – including by virtually all other ›real‹ scientific institutions. As Harriet Washington has documented:

»The dearly held precepts of scientific racism sound nakedly racist, absurd, or both today, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scientific racism was simply science, and it was promulgated by the very best minds at the most prestigious institutions of the nation. Other more logical medical theories stressed the equality of Africans and laid poor black health at the feet of their abusers, but these never enjoyed the appeal of the medical philosophy that justified slavers and, along with it, our nation’s profitable way of life.« ^[15]

Most readily recognize that almost all racial science (including a good deal of what is carried on to this day, under such banners as sociobiology, or evolutionary psychology) has been almost entirely composed of very baroque and intricate, but ultimately absurd and baseless fictions. The scientific-​technical benefit to the ruling class of an accurate understanding of human diversity has been overwhelmingly outweighed by the ideological benefits of racial mythology. And so, such was the »science« they called forth.

It is crucial to insist that this was so even though it necessarily hampered the maintenance of slaves as optimal workers. Indeed, those who insist that the ruling class would not deliberately maim us, because it would undermine our capacity to work, would do well to recall that the same argument was made in defense of slavery, which supposedly incentivized owners to take more diligent care of their property than a boss would of a replaceable employee. In fact it is well known that the not too distant history of notionally scientifically-​informed medical practice is riddled with practices now readily recognized as not only absurd and ineffectual, but also grotesque and dangerous. The field of »Negro medicine« practiced in the 19th century American South, for instance, was as Washinton notes, based on an »untested nucleus of mythology about the biological nature of blacks,« including »natural scientists‹ endless and largely fictional catalogs of ›racial‹ traits.«^[16] Some illustrations from this field are particularly instructive in our current moment.

Consider the case of Samuel A. Cartwright, M.D., one of the greatest pioneers in the field, appointed by the Medical Association of Louisiana to chair a committee investigating black health and physiology in 1848. As Washington notes, he »augmented his scholarly work with a constant onslaught of medically based pro-​slavery letters to newspapers and popular magazines.«^[17] The tapestry of »imaginary ›black‹ diseases, whose principal symptoms seemed to be a lack of enthusiasm for slavery,‹ « was as richly and intricately wrought as that which now confronts us under the banner of virology. They numbered among them ›drapetomania,‹ the pathological tendency to try and escape slavery; ›hebetude‹, the »singular laziness or shiftlessness tha caused slaves to mishandle and abuse their owners’ property,« and ›Dythesia Aethiopicirca‹ The latter drove the irrational desire to destroy the property of one’s master, and, in Cartwright’s words »differs from every other species of mental disease, as it is accompanied with physical signs or lesions of the body discoverable to the medical observer.«^[18] Astoundingly, unruly slaves were discovered to have mysterious welts on their backs! Thankfully, Cartwright identified the correct therapy – a good whipping and hard labor:

»The complaint is easily curable, if treated on sound physiological principles. The skin is dry, thick and harsh to the touch, and the liver inactive. The liver, skin and kidneys should be stimulated to activity, and be made to assist in decarbonising the blood. The best means to stimulate the skin is, first, to have the patient well washed with warm water and soap; then, to anoint it all over with oil, and to slap the oil in with a broad leather strap; then to put the patient to some hard kind of work in the open air and sunshine, that will compel him to expand his lungs, as chopping wood, splitting rails or sawing with the crosscut or whip saw. Any kind of labor will do that will cause full and free respiration in its performance.« ^[19]

Pica amongst slaves, almost certainly caused by extreme malnutrition, was pathologized as Cachexia Africana.^[20] In order to justify overwork in unsafe conditions, blacks were also held immune or insensitive to diseases assumed to be truly dangerous only to whites – such as heat prostration & sunstroke, or malaria – despite copious evidence that black slaves of course suffered from all such ailments. Empirical reality failed to undermine these ideologically important doctrines.^[21] This cruel and preposterous field of noxious pseudoscience was nonetheless sufficiently competent to produce the pronouncements of health which were a crucial element of the slave economy.

This is worth belaboring: Southern physicians’ role in the functioning of the slave market was extremely significant. Pronunciations of health, which were obtained to verify a slave was of quality worth buying, often cost as much as treatments. To the degree that the doctrines of »negro medicine« undermined the accuracy of the these diagnoses, they seriously undermined the capacity of the slaveholding class to extract value from slaves. Yet these strong economic incentives to accuracy were not sufficient to outweigh the countervailing incentives towards obfuscation, and so did not undermine the absurd doctrines of this field, as the superficial materialism which is now prevalent on much of the left would suggest. As ludicrous a diagnosis as Cartwright’s of Dysaethesia Aethiopica, which found the root cause of welts on slaves backs, not in their beatings, but in a lack thereof, was ultimately more beneficial to the slaveholder dispensing the beatings, even if so obviously wrong, than an understanding which made the slaveholder responsible and culpable.

The ruling class wants us, not healthy, but healthy enough to work for them under certain profitable conditions. And not so healthy that we can overpower them. They do not want us well educated, but educated well enough to do the tasks they dictate to us. And not well-​enough educated to see through their lies. A liberated proletarian science would conduce to the former– ruling class science aims for the latter. It is the gravest of errors to confuse them. As Tony Benn once observed: »an educated, healthy, and confident nation is harder to govern.«^[22]

Under What Conditions is Science Possible ?

Suspicion of and contempt for the pharmaceutical industry, and by extension at least some aspects of modern medicine, are widespread among the general population and above all amongst the most exploited sections of the working class all over the globe. This fact is often acknowledged even in the bourgeois press, though almost exclusively in a deeply paternalistic and dismissive fashion. Thus for instance skepticism about vaccines amongst the African American community in the USA is routinely belittled as a reasonable but outdated and unfortunate legacy of prior wrongdoings. The benighted masses need to be educated, for their own good. It is after all perhaps not very surprising that people whose social milieu heavily overlaps with the staff of NGOs, public health departments, and other entities which would gain funding from any such campaign are very eager to support them.

Yet the immediate and vulgar class interests of many on the organized left are an insufficient explanation here; across the demographics which dominate the leadership of the major left wing organizations in the West – above all clerks and knowledge workers of various sorts – there is a much deeper and more profound material and psychic investment in elite academic institutions and the ruling class ›science‹ they produce. It is central to the self-​conception of this class that knowledge-​production – even though funded by and produced on the terms of the ruling class – is somehow relatively autonomous and even self-​actualizing. In particular, they are deeply invested in a certain conception of science, which sees itself as driven entirely or at least primarily by its own internal dynamics.

This class will admit that under certain circumstances science may be better or worse funded; important avenues of research may be ignored because they are not profitable; certain regimes (mostly sinister non-​western boogeymen) may suppress certain elements of science. This may slow the progress of science, but science nonetheless progresses, more or less linearly, over time. Subscription to this article of faith allows them to perfunctorily reject the parallels noted above, between now well-​recognized pseudosciences of the past and modern virology. We have advanced beyond such conditions, we have better science which easily crowds out the bad. This sort of thinking was sharply criticized Walter Benjamin, who observed that:

»The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ›still‹ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge — unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.« ^[23]

The assumption that science consistently improves linearly or even exponentially is consistent with a liberal, idealist notion of history, but is completely contrary to historical materialism. Marxists recognize that science is not a self-​acting entity which floats above material reality: rather, science emerges out of certain material conditions – and doesn’t arise out of most others! Indeed, the vast majority of human social arrangements have not been favorable to the development of science. Most notably, it has been with the rise of capitalism itself which science is most associated – though the precise and true nature of that association is, itself, often subject to ideological obfuscation. As J.D. Bernal observed:

»It is apparent to us now, though it was certainly not then, that by the middle of the fifteenth century something new was beginning. We have come to look on the Renaissance as presaging the rise of capitalism, but it was not until the eighteenth century that any fundamental change was generally recognized. By then, through the application of science and invention, new possibilities were available to mankind which were likely to have an even larger effect on his future than those of agriculture and the techniques of early civilization. It is only recently that we have been able to separate in our minds the development of capitalist enterprise from that of science and the general liberation of human thought. Both seemed to be inextricably connected parts of Progress but at the same time, paradoxically, their appearance was greeted as evidence that man was returning to his natural state, freed from the arbitrary restrictions of religion or feudal authority. We now see that though capitalism was essential to the early development of science, giving it, for the first time, a practical value, the human importance of science transcends in every way that of capitalism, and, indeed, the full development of science in the service of humanity is incompatible with the continuance of capitalism.« ^[24]

It was the capitalist bourgeoisie, in their progressive struggle against the Ancien Regime – politically, ideologically, and economically– which brought about the first true great flourishing of science. Science was made possible by the new liberation of thought and speech, combined with the massive incentivization of technological innovation which is a structural feature of capitalist relations.^[25]

As noted above, however, the politico-​ideological weaponry forged in the struggle against fuedalism, viz. ›Liberalism‹ was not without its contradictions. Before they knew it, the bourgeoisie soon found themselves besieged by the workers, demanding a consistent and thorough application of liberal political principles. If equality and democracy are appropriate in the civil sphere, why not the economic? If subordination to the arbitrary power of a monarch or aristocrat are incompatible with man’s dignity, why is the same not true of a manager or boss? Darwinian biological concepts played a key role in obfuscating or rationalizing these contradictions: your boss is your natural superior, capitalists could argue, because of his superior genes (of course, the argument would rarely be put forth so blatantly). We note this contradiction here, though, simply to emphasize the contradictory and complicated relationship between capitalism, liberalism, and democracy. There is extensive Marxist literature on this topic which we will not delve into here.^[26]

What is less well appreciated is the overlapping and equally complicated relationship between capitalism and science, even in their heyday. In the same manner that capitalists were interested in democracy only under very limited and specific conditions, so too, they have long made sure that scientific progress in no way undermines their profits or class position. This is perhaps most glaringly evident in the persistent struggle of capitalists to impose trademark and patent restrictions on novel technology or research. More significantly, the conditions which fostered some of the most awesome advances of science under capitalism were the result of the successful class struggle of workers against capitalism.

Above all, the successful struggle for public education, and for the necessary nutritional levels to actually benefit from it, were key elements without which the real wonders of modern science would have been impossible. The epochal victories of the working class in establishing the USSR, the PRC, and the other Actually Existing Socialist or popular anti-​colonial regimes of the 20th century massively increased the power of all workers the world over. These conditions exerted strong pressure on capitalists to employ science in forms that were at least partially beneficial to humanity, both in the form of a large market for high-​quality consumer goods and in various forms of direct or indirect democratic influence of government budgets. On a deeper and more complicated level, which will be expanded upon below, the ideology of science, especially virology, obscured the goods which the masses had won for themselves through their political struggles on the one hand, and their productive labor on the other. For, as we will show, almost all of the reduction in illness and death which has been attributed to the intervention of virology, are in fact a result of improved nutrition and living standards which resulted from successful labor struggles against capital.

However, the specific history of virology is a matter for part 3. Here we are concerned with the politico-​economic conditions under which any humanly beneficial science is possible. In the twentieth century, socialism in the second and third world forced, even in the capitalist first world, a social democratic compromise between workers and the ruling class. This yielded a number of factors which were particularly conducive to the generation of science. Nonetheless, they were balanced by countervailing tendencies, particularly in specific scientific fields, which were profoundly contrary to the flourishing of science. This balance of forces is sketched out in my essay »Imperialism Today is Conspiracy Praxis,« and will thus be only cursorily summarized here.^[27]

The Cold War functioned as a massive impetus to the centralizing tendencies within capitalism analyzed by Marx, Lenin, and many others. Already, as Lenin showed in his pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, monopolization and financialization had so thoroughly altered the operation of capitalism, that by the dawn of the 20th century:

»Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialization of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialization. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The general framework of formally recognised free competition remains, and the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.« ^[28]

With what unfortunately proved to be excessive optimism, Lenin assumed that the socialization of production which had occurred under imperialist capitalism would soon lay the foundation for socialism. This was not the case (at least not yet). The capitalists in the imperialist core were not overthrown. On the contrary, in the struggle against global communism, the highest levels of the bourgeoisie were able to attain radical, unprecedented control over their junior partners, the lower rungs of the bourgeoisie, the petty-​bourgeoisie, and various feudal remnants. Financialization and cartelization, which as both Lenin and Marx analyzed, emerged out of capitalism but also progressively abolish the conditions for the operation of capitalism, grew ever more pronounced. As I argue in the above cited essay, a rigorous materialist analysis forces us to conclude that rule by such an imperialist-​monopolist clique induces such tremendous distortions in the ›capitalist economy‹ as to even warrant discussion of a qualitatively different mode of production. One must not, however, agree to such radical conclusions, in order to entertain the hypothesis developed in this essay: that the staggering concentrations of wealth and power which characterize society today, controlled by secretive networks overlapping with intelligence agencies and the world’s most powerful political and military actors, are neither conducive to, nor perhaps even minimally compatible with, a flourishing science.

This wealth concentration undermines ostensibly scientific institutions and bodies from within, corrupting and distorting their operation to the point at which only the outward semblance of science remains. The more real scientific practice is departed from, however, the more hysterically and peremptorily does it claim the mantle of science, and police the participation thereof. Science is declared the exclusive purview of the brevetted members of »scientific« institutions and bodies, all strictly controlled and dominated by the ruling class. Feynman correctly identified this trend, and fought against it, as early as 1966. A portion of his speech to science teachers, quoted in part above, is worth relaying at greater length here:

»Another of the qualities of science is that it teaches the value of rational thought as well as the importance of freedom of thought; the positive results that come from doubting that the lessons are all true. You must here distinguish – especially in teaching– science from the forms or procedures that are sometimes used in developing science. It is easy to say, ›We write, experiment, and observe, and do this or that.‹ You can copy that form exactly. But great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-​science. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisers.

We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders’ airfields – radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great aeroplane to arrive. They even build wooden aeroplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners’ airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. [But] you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts.

As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way:

Science is the belief in the ignorance of Experts. When someone says, ›science teaches such and such,‹ he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, ›science has shown such and such,‹ you might ask, »How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?« It should not be ›science has shown‹ but ›this experiment, this effect, has shown.‹ And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments – but be patient and listen to all the evidence – to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.« ^[29]

Over the past three years we have seen a grotesque parody of this trend in the hysterical demands to »trust the experts.« Below, we will show the compelling evidence that mainstream virology in particular is a striking example of just such psueodscience. Finally, we will have to show how, tragically, many so-​called Marxists have substituted Marx’s commitment to scientific inquiry for a vulgar scientism. Of course, the true mark of science was identified by Marx himself: science is hard, it demands effort. Slavishly enforcing the ideology of the ruling class is, comparatively, quite easy. As he noted in the 1872 preface to the French edition of Capital:

»There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.« ^[30]

Continue to Part 2.

Footnotes

^[1] Tim Hains, »Fauci: Attacking Me Is Attacking Science,« Real Clear Politics, June 9, 2021, https://​www​.realclearpolitics​.com/​v​i​d​e​o​/​2​0​2​1​/​0​6​/​0​9​/​f​a​u​c​i​_​a​t​t​a​c​k​i​n​g​_​m​e​_​i​s​_​a​t​t​a​c​k​i​n​g​_​s​c​i​e​n​c​e​.​h​tml#!

^[2] Torsten Engelbrecht et al., Virus Mania: How the Medical Industry Continually Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-​Dollar Profits At Our Expense, 3rd ed. (Books on Demand, 2021), Introduction. (Henceforth: Engelbrecht et al., Virus Mania).

^[3] T. Mohr, »Imperialism Today is Conspiracy Praxis,« Magma- Magazin Der Masse, September 24 2022,https://magma-magazin.su/2022/09/t‑mohr/imperialism-today-is-conspiracy-praxis/.

^[4] Richard Feynman, »What is Science?« (presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and reprinted from The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6, 1969, pp. 313 – 320, http://​www​.feynman​.com/​s​c​i​e​n​c​e​/​w​h​a​t​-​i​s​-​s​c​i​e​n​ce/. (Henceforth: Feynman, »What is Science?«

^[5] Richard Levins, »The Two Faces of Science« (Talk, HealthRoots Political Economy of Health Seminar Series, Harvard School of Public Health, Wed. Oct 17th | 12: 30 PM). (Henceforth: Levins, »The Two Faces of Science«). https://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​a​E​A​0​u​t​1​G​uh4

^[6] David Fernbach, in: Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach, vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 1993), Preface, 93, footnote.

^[7] Richard Lewontin, »Biology as Ideology« (Radio Lecture, CBC Massey Lectures, November 1990). (Henceforth, Lewontin, »Biology as Ideology«)

^[8] Klein highlights in particular the profound work being done for DARPA by Michael Levin at Tufts, substantially based on soviet science.

^[9] Lewontin, »Biology as Ideology.«

^[10] Catherine Austin Fitts, »The Injection Fraud – it’s Not a Vaccine,« Solari Report, May 27, 2020, https://​home​.solari​.com/​d​e​e​p​-​s​t​a​t​e​-​t​a​c​t​i​c​s​-​1​0​1​-​t​h​e​-​c​o​v​i​d​-​i​n​j​e​c​t​i​o​n​-​f​r​a​u​d​-​i​t​s​-​n​o​t​-​a​-​v​a​c​c​i​ne/.

^[11] Jim West, »Everything You Learned About the Cause of Polio is Wrong,»GreenMedInfo, August 21st 2015, https://​greenmedinfo​.com/​b​l​o​g​/​e​v​e​r​y​t​h​i​n​g​-​y​o​u​-​l​e​a​r​n​e​d​-​a​b​o​u​t​-​c​a​u​s​e​-​p​o​l​i​o​-​w​r​ong

^[12] For a more extensive analysis of this gambit, see Red Kahina’s thread here https://​twitter​.com/​R​e​d​K​a​h​i​n​a​/​s​t​a​t​u​s​/​1​4​4​8​9​0​9​1​1​9​1​1​3​6​4​6​080 , Substack https://​redkahina​.substack​.com/ and Lectures (https://​www​.youtube​.com/​@​r​e​d​p​o​d​c​a​s​t​c​h​a​n​n​e​l​4​262 )

^[13] Lewontin, »Biology as Ideology,« Lecture 4.

^[14] See Part 2 of this essay.

^[15] Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Knopf Doubleday, 2008), p.42.(Henceforth: Washington, Medical Apartheid).

^[16] Washington, Medical Apartheid, p. 32.

^[17] Ibid. p.36

^[18] Ibid.

^[19] Arthur L. Caplan, James J. McCartney, Dominic A. Sisti, eds, Health, Disease, and Illness: Concepts in Medicine (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2004) p. 37.

^[20] Washington, Medical Apartheid, p.36

^[21] Washington, Medical Apartheid, p. 39 – 41

^[22] Interview with Michael Moore, Sicko (The Weinstein Company, 2007).

^[23] Walter Benjamin, »On the Concept of History,« Trans. 2005 Dennis Redmond from Gesammelten Schriften I:2. (Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1974). https://​www​.marxists​.org/​r​e​f​e​r​e​n​c​e​/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​/​b​e​n​j​a​m​i​n​/​1​9​4​0​/​h​i​s​t​o​r​y​.​htm

^[24]John Desmond Bernal, »The Social Function of Science,« Modern Quarterly (1938), https://​www​.marxists​.org/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​/​b​e​r​n​a​l​/​w​o​r​k​s​/​1​9​3​0​s​/​s​o​c​i​a​l​s​c​i​e​n​c​e​.​htm

^[25] Specifically, the pursuit of Relative Surplus Value, as described by Marx in Capital..

^[26] Most significant recent additions to this corpus include Ishay Landa’s The Apprentice’s Sorcerer (2009) and Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-​History (2005).

^[27] T. Mohr, »Imperialism Today is Conspiracy Praxis,« Magma- Magazin Der Masse, September 24 2022,https://magma-magazin.su/2022/09/t‑mohr/imperialism-today-is-conspiracy-praxis/.

^[28] Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), https://​www​.marxists​.org/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​/​l​e​n​i​n​/​w​o​r​k​s​/​1​9​1​6​/​i​m​p​-​h​sc/ , Ch. 1.

^[29] Feynman, »What is Science?«

^[30] Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954) https://​www​.marxists​.org/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​/​m​a​r​x​/​w​o​r​k​s​/​1​8​6​7​-​c​1​/​p​2​.​htm, Preface.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelten Schriften I:2. Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1974..

Bernal, John Desmond. »The Social Function of Science.« Modern Quarterly (1938). https://​www​.marxists​.org/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​/​b​e​r​n​a​l​/​w​o​r​k​s​/​1​9​3​0​s​/​s​o​c​i​a​l​s​c​i​e​n​c​e​.​htm.

Caplan, Arthur L., James J. McCartney, Dominic A. Sisti, eds. Health, Disease, and Illness: Concepts in Medicine. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2004.

Engelbrecht, Torsten, Köhnlein Claus, Samatha Bailey, and Stefano Scoglio. Virus Mania: How the Medical Industry Continually Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-​Dollar Profits At Our Expense. 3rd ed. Books on Demand, 2021

Feynman, Richard. »What is Science?« Presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and reprinted from The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6, 1969, pp. 313 – 320 on www. Feynman​.com. http://​www​.feynman​.com/​s​c​i​e​n​c​e​/​w​h​a​t​-​i​s​-​s​c​i​e​n​ce/.

Fitts, Catherine Austin. »The Injection Fraud – it’s Not a Vaccine.« Solari Report, May 27, 2020. https://​home​.solari​.com/​d​e​e​p​-​s​t​a​t​e​-​t​a​c​t​i​c​s​-​1​0​1​-​t​h​e​-​c​o​v​i​d​-​i​n​j​e​c​t​i​o​n​-​f​r​a​u​d​-​i​t​s​-​n​o​t​-​a​-​v​a​c​c​i​ne/.

Hains, Tim. »Fauci: Attacking Me Is Attacking Science .« Real Clear Politics , June 2021, https://​www​.realclearpolitics​.com/​v​i​d​e​o​/​2​0​2​1​/​0​6​/​0​9​/​f​a​u​c​i​_​a​t​t​a​c​k​i​n​g​_​m​e​_​i​s​_​a​t​t​a​c​k​i​n​g​_​s​c​i​e​n​c​e​.​h​tml#!

Lenin, Vladimir. Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963. https://​www​.marxists​.org/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​/​l​e​n​i​n​/​w​o​r​k​s​/​1​9​1​6​/​i​m​p​-​h​sc/.

Levins, Richard. »The Two Faces of Science.« Talk presented at HealthRoots Political Economy of Health Seminar Series, Harvard School of Public Health, Wed. Oct 17th | 12: 30 PM. https://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​a​E​A​0​u​t​1​G​uh4

Lewontin, Richard. »Biology as Ideology.« Radio Lecture for CBC Massey Lectures, November 1990. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1990-cbc-massey-lectures-biology-as-ideology‑1.2946847

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954.

— — – Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by David Fernbach. Vol. 2. London: Penguin, 1993.

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West, Jim. »Everything You Learned About the Cause of Polio is Wrong. « GreenMedInfo, August 21st 2015. https://​greenmedinfo​.com/​b​l​o​g​/​e​v​e​r​y​t​h​i​n​g​-​y​o​u​-​l​e​a​r​n​e​d​-​a​b​o​u​t​-​c​a​u​s​e​-​p​o​l​i​o​-​w​r​ong.

Wikisource contributors. »Page:Congressional Record Volume 81 Part 3.djvu/154.« Wikisource. https://​en​.wikisource​.org/​w​/​i​n​d​e​x​.​p​h​p​?​t​i​t​l​e​=​P​a​g​e​:​C​o​n​g​r​e​s​s​i​o​n​a​l​_​R​e​c​o​r​d​_​V​o​l​u​m​e​_​8​1​_​P​a​r​t​_​3​.​d​j​v​u​/​1​5​4​&​o​l​d​i​d​=​7​8​8​1​645 (accessed January 13, 2023).

Acknowledgments

This essay is profoundly indebted to the feedback, commentary, and editing of Molly Klein, Karel Svoboda, and Hieropunk. It is also extensively informed by the criticism and analysis of Jacob Levich, as well as Phil Greaves and the network of commentators and researchers around them.

Cover Image: »Death and the physician« from Der Doten dantz mit figuren : Clage vnd Antwort schon von allen staten der welt, 1495?, wikimedia commons