The Gap Between Science and Society and the Intrinsically Capitalistic Character of Science Communication

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Science Communication inheres to the capitalist relations of production. By making use of Marxist dialectics, the enquiry will elucidate the enquiry will elucidate that capital creates the gap between science and society that Science Communication is deemed to bridge, for capitalism deprives workers of the ‘intellectual potencies of the material process of production’ and makes both impossible and meaningless for them to appropriate scientific knowledge in a direct, unmediated manner. Along these lines, the paper will revisit the long-standing ‘deskilling-upskilling debate’ in order to shed light on what specific workers’ productive attributes form the material basis on which Science Communication grounded. I conclude that the existence of Science Communication responds to the fact that workers are devoid of any control over the social qualitative content of their work – the purpose and the mode of the labouring activity. In other words, Science Communication is premised on the limited form taken by the productive consciousness capital equips workers with in order just to reproduce itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Science communication
• science and society
• capital
• alienation
• productive subjectivity

Acknowledgement

The author wants to thank the two anonymous peers that reviewed preliminary versions of this manuscript for their pertinent comments and suggestions. He also wants to express his gratitude to Luisa Íñigo, who generously dedicated part of her scarce time to debate with the author some of topics addressed in this paper. Nevertheless, the sole responsibility for the claims made in this work is the author’s.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Despite that, at this level of abstraction, the investigation is concerned with the most general or simplest content of science, the very notion of ‘objectivity’ already hints at the historical determinateness of science as a particular form of human knowledge-production. Objective thinking is only possible when social production has attained a genuinely objective basis, that is to say, when individual capabilities, natural dispositions and exertions are no longer pivotal for the labouring activity. That objective framework is provided by large-scale industry and its backbone, the system of machinery – i.e., once capitalist production has obtained a technical basis corresponding to its own. Therefore, science did not develop fully until mid-XVIII, once the automatic system of machinery came into being and dissolved manufacturing-like forms of production (see Arboledas-Lérida 2020).

2. The meaninglessness of the internalisation by the worker of all the riches of world-historical labour will be clarified below, once the enquiry addresses how capital impinges on workers’ productive attributes as it curbs the control they can exert over their own forms of combination and cooperation. It will suffice to point out that knowing, as any other human practice, is actualised in the face of given social purposes and needs (Azeri 2020). Insofar as capital narrows the purposiveness of knowledge production to the imperatives of value-valorisation, it would make little sense to workers to spend part of their labouring capacity mastering tools that facilitate the satisfaction of needs that are absent.

3. Universality is not tantamount to abstraction if abstraction is understood as the reconstruction in thought of a given object setting aside all its historical determinateness. That is actually the procedure followed by bourgeois scientific reasoning (see Marx 1987, 37; Azeri 2016). Universal thought, on the contrary, is one that grasps the more concrete and, by the same token, the more general real forms in their potentiality for self-development, yielding thereby a rich totality of manifold determinations and relations for the subject-matter at stake (Marx 1987, 37). Universalistic forms of thought can be forged on the basis of the increasingly universalistic character taken on by social labour alone, to wit, labour that puts to an end any special development of human beings (‘craft-idiocy’, see Marx 1976, 190) and that turns every social function that the labouring subject performs into ‘many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers’ (Marx 1996, 490–491). It shall be seen below that capitalism immanently sets barriers against the fully-fledged unfolding of such universalism.

4. The socialisation of production cannot be completed within the framework of the capital, as the latter is premised on social labour privately and independently performed – the labour of each individual/unit of production asserts itself as part of social labour post-festum (once it has been performed) and in a mediated form. The movement of the contradiction between universality and particularity asserts itself here again: capital’s immanent drive towards absolute socialisation becomes denied by the reciprocal action of multiple capitals upon each other, the only form of movement through which capital asserts its innermost tendencies (cfr. Alvater 1978, 41). Crucially for our argument, Lukács (1971, 102) remarks that capitalist production is feasible because commodity producers are not knowledgeable about the totality of the laws regulating their productive activities – commodity producers can only organise their participation in the metabolic process according to those laws which express the autonomously and unconsciously reciprocal action they exert upon one another, for instance, the establishment of the general rate of profit.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Seville with a fellowship granted under its VI Framework Programme for Research and Knowledge Transfer [‘VI Plan Propio de Investigación y Transferencia – VI PPITUS’].

Notes on contributors

Luis Arboledas-Lérida

Luis Arboledas-Lérida is a research fellow at the University of Seville. His current work focuses on the analysis of Science Communication as a particular mode of existence of the capitalist relationship of production, that is to say, as both a constituent and a product of the antagonistic character taken on by social labour under capitalism. He also undertakes teaching in Science Communication and Science Journalism for graduate students.