The New Haven chapter of Science for the People invites all scientists, tech and academic workers in Connecticut and beyond to join us in the struggle against capitalism, the reactionary politics that undergird it, and the false promise of liberalism as a political alternative. The only real alternative is to establish vibrant anti-capitalist mass organizations.
Trump returning to the White House signals a serious decline in the ability of liberalism to justify itself as a progressive political alternative to reactionary conservatism. For decades, liberalism and conservatism have operated as two faces of the same coin: hand-in-hand they propel capitalism forward by inertia, if nothing else.
As such, we see that liberalism fails again and again to secure even the most basic protections for abortion access, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community, a weakness that will now be exploited by Trump and his neo-fascist cronies.
What does this mean for scientists, for whom liberalism is often the political partner to the perceived progress of science?
First we should ask: what has liberalism offered to science as a human endeavor?
Our view is that liberalism has duped scientists again and again. While budgets for vital basic research recede and scientific activity is further cordoned off into private firms with no accountability to the public, liberals have turned a blind eye to the impending climate catastrophe and placed science in deeper subservience to the military industrial complex. This makes scientists the stooges of capitalism, imperialism, and ecological exploitation against their will, the consequences of which have become devastatingly apparent as the genocide in Gaza proceeds uninhibited with the full support of the Democratic Party.
Moreover, as science continues to become a more diverse profession, the oppression of people with marginalized identities will not only hurt our friends and colleagues, but undermine scientific work by making the discipline even more precarious for many people.
How can scientists resist this depravity and build a better alternative?
We compel scientists to realize their role as agents in class struggle, rather than elite, individual, and politically disaffected actors.
Science is a social endeavor, driven by the combined efforts of vast numbers of people working diligently across the globe. The products of science form the basis of the modern world: technological advancements most often start in publicly-funded laboratories. But most scientists have no control over how the products of their research are used. Our disciplines are driven by university administrators, venture capitalists, and the boards of tech companies. Scientists are thereby made more and more into proletarians: cogs trained in the academic machine to which we must submit in return for a paltry wage, insufficient benefits, and no social safety net.
We do not have to accept this fate.
We should accept that the conditions of science are deteriorating under the stewardship of liberalism, and with them the conditions of life on Earth. We believe this ought to compel scientists to recognize that their fate is intertwined with that of all proletarianized working people, in the so-called US and around the world. If this is true, it’s about time we start acting like it!
Scientists need to organize within the working class, and we offer Science for the People as a home for all scientific workers to begin to organize in opposition to capitalism, the false hope of liberalism, and the depravity of conservatism and neo-fascism.
This means that scientific workers need to rebuild the infrastructure of working class institutions in their workplaces, their apartment buildings, and in their communities. Whether we are fighting for better wages, reduced rents, or against imperialism, we should be cohereing these struggles into a unified political movement against capitalism and for socialism.