Letter to Alex Steiner of the Permanent Revolution journal, on his apparent support for gain-of-function research at Boston Univer
November 6, 2022
To Alex Steiner,
Dear Alex,
You recently posted an article, from what I gather, to the Pacifica radio network’s Covid Task Force list, from the wsws.org, by Dr. Benjamin Mateus, smearing critics of the gain of function research conducted at Boston University to make the Omicron Covid-19 variant 80X more infections, as “right-wing reactionaries”.[i] Author Mateus, typically for him over the past few years, takes at face value the apologetics for this research, as having
the potential for identifying new strategies for therapeutics and mechanisms for viral evolution, especially in light of the global catastrophe that has claimed the lives of more than 22 million people and countless more millions impacted by the chronic consequences of their infections.
I certainly don’t have a problem with you posting this article. But you did so as if to endorse its content, without any criticism or even comment offered. Do you agree with it?!
If so, that would be very surprising. I would have hoped that at least one of the differences you and your associates at Permanent Revolution hold against the SEP--your affinity for the ideas of the Frankfurt School, against David North’s crude dismissal[ii]--would have led you to challenge this content:. Mateus’ uncritical acceptance of a “one dimensionalizing” “Trump Derangement Syndrome”[iii], as well as his obvious scientism. These fallacies have led the SEP to brand all opponents of these untested and highly dangerous Covid-19 “vaccines, and now all critics of gain-of-function research (oddly enough, banned by Democrat Obama, but then revived by Republican Trump!), as right wing conspiracy theorists and fascists (including the working class Canadian and U.S. truckers!).
Yet the Frankfurt School was critical of the “one dimensionalizing” of thought so blatantly presented here by Mateus, as well as the scientism and the technomania so evident here.
The early 1960s book One Dimensional Man, alongside U.S. social critics such as C. Wright Mills and Dwight MacDonald, attacked the the “Vital Center” liberals led by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. These liberals, Marcuse, Mills and MacDonald pointed out were fleeing from their earlier radicalism during the Great Depression, to embrace an early version of the same either-or thinking that seems to have infected Mateus and the SEP: anyone critical of the “technological society” is a right wing conspiracy nut.
The Frankfurt School was also very critical of the uncritical acceptance of technological idolatry. For example, Erich Fromm, at one time the Director of Social Psychology for the Frankfurt School, in The Revolution of Hope, wrote that the modern idolatry of technique upholds the dubious principle,
that something ought to be done if it is technically possible to be done…. This principle means the negation of all values which the humanist tradition has developed…that something should be done because it is needed for man, for his growth, joy and reason, because it is beautiful, good are true [but with this modern technological idolatry] all [such] values are dethroned.
Alexander Mitscherlich was another Freudian Marxist/social psychologist, and German expatriate during the Nazi takeover, who was associated with the later Frankfurt School. He had this to say, in his Society Without the Father, about the social psychology of technomania. In this delusion, people see technology as
a mother goddess with innumerable breasts…. technology is relied on to bring about incubator [i.e., womb-like] conditions….When a new technical gadget is successfully launched…, prestige is associated with the toy, whether it be a camera or a private bar or a private swimming-pool.
My lengthiest and last quote is from the article on Herbert Marcuse, who wrote as follows about the oppressive quality of the "technological boom" under capitalism. As you can see, the passages below from Marcuse about the potentially oppressive nature of technology when it rests in the hands of the capitalist class, is well summarized in the following excerpt from an article written recently, touching on the dangers of “transhumanism”, by Adam Radek, in Red Fire Online:
Socialists are the last ones to oppose the use of technology to advance society, and in fact are its foremost advocates. However, as long as the working class does not have its hands on the reigns of state power, the capitalist ruling classes will use advances in technology for their advantage, and no one else’s. If technological advances allow capitalist state authorities to track and trace workers, to determine their ideological and political identities in an instant, to block “undesirables” (such as those who refuse what is most likely an extremely dangerous and experimental Covid vaccine) from accessing public transport or travelling overseas, then they will do it. The further the system of production for private profit drags society down, the greater the degree of political repression is required by the ruling elite. While technological improvements can make some aspects of workers’ lives easier, the agents of big capital can also use them for merciless tyranny.[iv]
Now here is a passage from the entry on Herbert Marcuse in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
In their famous book Dialectic of Enlightenment Marcuse’s colleagues Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno attempted to demonstrate that the Enlightenment embodied a tension between its own project of liberation and its own new mechanisms of oppression and domination. For Marcuse, modern technology (a product of the Enlightenment) embodies a similar tension. The question for him was “what role does technology play in the project of human emancipation?” The technological boom has been supported by the idea that there is some fundamental connection between technological development and the human quest for liberation and a better life. However, we were disabused of this idea by Freud and many others. The question now is “does technological advance lead to more repression and domination?”
Marcuse’s critical theory is always dialectical, as he examines forms of oppression and domination while also, at the same, looking for the potential for liberation. In an essay entitled “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology” written in 1941, Marcuse makes an important distinction between technology and technics. He would continue to employ some version of this distinction for the rest of his life when writing about technology. In this essay he says:
...
In this article, technology is taken as a social process in which technics proper (that is, the technical apparatus of industry, transportation, communication) is but a partial factor. We do not ask for the …
… an instrument for control and domination. Technics by itself can promote authoritarianism as well as liberty, scarcity as well as abundance, the extension as well as the abolition of toil. (Marcuse 1998)
On the basis of the above passage it may sound as if technics is neutral as it can promote either oppression or liberation. However, this is not the case. Marcuse makes this clear in another essay entitled “The Problem of Social Change in the Technological Society” written twenty years later. Also, in a 1960 essay entitled “From Ontology to Technology”, using the term “technicity” instead of “technics” he again rejects the neutrality of technics or technicity. By “technics”, Marcuse means the devices or instruments that are used to transform nature in the service of human beings.
Technics is the methodological negation of nature by human thought and action. In this negation, natural conditions and relations become instrumentalities for the preservation, enlargement, and refinement of human society. (Marcuse 2011: 45)
By “Technology”, Marcuse means the mode of production or the totality of instruments, devices, etc.
If technology refers to a mode of production or totality of instruments, then as such it is situated within a certain ideological structure, indeed, it is a form of ideology which determines the form of machinery for a particular form of production as well as that form of production itself. Here, “ideology” simply refers to a belief system or a way of thinking which would include the telos or purpose of all social thought and action.
At the level of technics, a machine can be considered neutral only as pure matter, but in a technological society no such machine exists, hence, technics is not neutral. Every machine is constituted within a web of social, political, economic meaning, an ensemble of social relations. Technics exists within a certain mode of production as well as in certain relations of production. Every technical item is given a mission and is to further the goals of the present reality principle or capitalist performance principle. There is a dialectic involved here insofar as even if modern technology has its origin in a repressive, oppressive, capitalist reality principle, this same technology carries within itself other possibilities.
Marcuse believed that it was possible to conceive of technology under an entirely new reality principle. In the capitalist system, technics and its governing technological ideology is based on the performance principle of competition and production and must serve the goals set by this performance principle. Even if scarcity is no longer a real problem, the idea and fear of scarcity are taken up and put to work for the ideology of production for the sake of production and competition for the sake of competition. We are never told that at this moment we have the necessary resources to end world hunger. Instead, we are told that more and more technological progress will end the problem of scarcity.
According to Marcuse, the use that is made of technology is ideologically shaped by the present reality principle. It is this oppressive/repressive reality principle that shapes the telos of technological development. Hence, neither technology nor technics can be neutral because the entire meaning and purpose of such has its birth within a reality and performance principle that as Marcuse has reminded us, does not have the liberation and happiness of all human beings as its goal. The entire technological and technical apparatus is given its form and mission by the ruling class.
According to Marcuse, a new sensibility, that is, a reshaping of human relationships with each other as well as with nature would usher in a new reality principle. With this new reality principle would come a new mission or telos for technology. Under this new reality principle it would be unthinkable to associate technological progress with the building of bombs and more sophisticated instruments of death.
****************************************************************************************************
So, Alex, I don't understand how you can square your affinity with the Frankfurt School, with your presentation of this wretchedly one-dimensional, scientistic article by Ben Mateus in the wsws. Would you care to explain? Of if you can't, would you like to rethink this folly?
Comradely,
Thomas Smith....
[i] Benjamin Mateus, “Boston University study on Omicron variant smeared as dangerous gain-of-function research by right-wing reactionaries.” 1 November, 2022, at Boston University study on Omicron variant smeared as dangerous gain-of-function research by right-wing reactionaries - World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)
[ii] David North, The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique, Mehring Books, 2015. While North is correct to assert that the leading members of the Frankfurt School, along with their associate Wilhelm Reich, concluded prematurely, as a result of their Freudian Marxism, that they could and should write off the working class as the revolutionary class in modern capitalist society, since this class had allegedly been incorporated permanently into the mass “culture industry.” But on this very narrow basis, North makes the unwarranted claim that very little if anything these Frankfurt School members wrote has anything to contribute to the socialist workers movement. This original sin, as it were, has placed them beyond the pale. Steiner correctly points out the fallacy with this attitude toward the F.S.
[iii] See Christian Parenti, “How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind.” March 31, 2022, at https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/31/left-covid-lockdowns-mind-autopsy/
[iv] “Stop the Great Reset”, Red Fire Online, December 16, 2020, at https://redfireonline.com/2020/12/16/stop-the-great-reset/