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PEOPLE'S SCIENCE Bill Zimmerman et ale In the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci refused to publish plans for a submarine because he anticipated that it would be used as a weapon. In the seventeenth century, for similar reasons, Boyle kept secret a poison he had developed. In 1946, Leo Szilard, who had been one of the key developers of the atom bomb, quit physics in disillusionment over the ways in which the government had used his work. By and large, this kind of resistance on the part of scientists to the misuse of their research has been very sporadic, from isolated individuals, and generally in opposition only to particular, unusually repugnant projects. As such, it has been ineffective. If scientists want to help prevent socially destructive applications of science, they must forgo acting in an ad hoc or purely moralistic fashion and begin to respond collectively from the vantage point of a political and economic analysis of their work. This analysis must be firmly anchored in an understanding of the u.S. corporate state. We will argue below that science is inevitably political, and in the context of contemporary u.S. corporate capitalism, that it contributes greatly to the exploitation and oppression of most of the people both in this country and abroad. We will call for a reorientation of scientific work and will suggest ways in which scientific workers can redirect their research to further meaningful social change. Science in Capitalist America Concurrent with the weakening of Cold War ideology over the past fifteen years has been the growing realization on the part of increasing numbers of Americans that a tiny minority of the population, through its wealth and power, controls the major decision-making institutions of our society. Research such as that of Mills (The Power Elite), Domhoff (Who Rules America), and Lundgren (The Rich and the Superrich) has exposed the existence of this minority to public scrutiny. Although the term ruling class may have an anachronistic ring to some, we still find it useful to describe that dominant minority that owns and controls the productive economic resources of our society. The means by which the u.S. ruling class exerts control in our society and over much of the Third World has been de- PEOPLE'S SCIENCE / 441 scribed in such works as Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital, Horowitz's Free World Colossus, and Magdoff's Age of Imperialism. These works argue that it is not a conspiracy, but rather the logical outcome of corporate capitalism that a minority with wealth and power, functioning efficiently within the system to maintain its position, inevitably will oversee the oppression and exploitation of the majority of the people in this country, as well as the more extreme impoverishment and degradation of the people in the Third World. It is within the context of this political-economic system-a system that has produced the militaryindustrial complex as its highest expression and that will use all the resources at its disposal to maintain its control, that is, within the context of the u.S. corporate state-that we must consider the role played by scientific work. We view the long-term strategy of the u.S. capitalist class as resting on two basic pillars. The first is the maintenance and strengthening of the international domination of u.S. capital. The principal economic aspect of this lies in continually increasing the profitable opportunities for the export of capital in order to absorb the surplus constantly being generated both internally and abroad. With the growing revolt of the oppressed peoples of the world, the traditional political and military mechanisms necessary to sustain this imperialist control are disintegrating . More and more the u.S. ruling class is coming to rely openly on technological and military means of mass terror and repression which approach genocide: anti-personnel bombs, napalm, pacification-assassination programs, herbicides and other attempts to induce famines, etc. While this use of scientific resources is becoming more clearly evident (witness the crisis of conscience among increasing numbers of young scientists), the importance of scientific and technological resources for the second pillar of capitalist strategy is even more central, although less generally accorded the significance it deserves. The second fundamental thrust of capitalist political economic strategy is to guarantee a steady and predictable increase in the maintenance of the profitability of domestic industry and its ability to compete on the international market. Without this increase in labour productivity it would be impossible to...

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