Cosmonaut has published a polemic by Jibreel Kateb against what he calls the “pragmatic idealism” of Geese Magazine, aimed at two pieces: P. K. Gandakin’s “On Marx’s Materialism” and Sarkozy’s “The Marxist Critique of Science Has Run Out of Steam.” It’s a good fight to have, and Kateb is right that the philosophical problems of science have unduly “faded to the periphery” for Marxists. The exchange has since continued in the letters column, with Clara S. writing in on what Peirce does and doesn’t say, and a second letter from Kateb that reconstructs Gandakin’s central argument formally and sets out, “dogmatically,” his own philosophy of science as a numbered list.^[1]

I would like to contribute to the exchange, because I see a gap between the authors’ positions. All three authors locate the problem at the material and institutional level. They all then explain it and propose to fix it at the level of how people think about science and its production. But this is only one part of the problem. Two things are missing. The first is a distinction that none of them hold in the right relation between the way knowledge production is organized and the resistance the world exerts against what gets claimed about it; it is collapsed on one side of the argument and quarantined on the other. The second is historical: the theory that would have held both halves together was never finished, and nobody who only acknowledged half of it was answerable to anyone who needed the other half, which is why we’ll be traveling to the 1930s later.

Cosmonaut itself already published the other half. Renato Flores’s “Knowledge: Power and Emancipation” runs from the Zilsel thesis to the Black Panthers’ clinics on a single question: who is licensed to produce knowledge, and who is blocked from doing so. His article touches the second question once, in a subordinate clause: the many ways of arranging knowledge are “all subordinate to the criterion of truth-through-practice.” It doesn’t discuss how that criterion works. That the clause stays subordinate follows from the frame rather than from inattention. On an account organized by appropriation and restitution, knowledge is a stock generated below and captured above, and what matters is who holds it. The piece mainly discusses knowledge production in the past tense: privatization cut knowledge off from practice, which made room for idealism. It doesn’t really center the question of how a body’s composition governs what it can find out next. The exchange between Kateb and the Geese authors addresses the second question with the first bracketed. Neither are wrong in what they say; they’re two halves of the same book, and the split has a history.

The Three Positions

Gandakin argues that Marxism has been turned into a “verificationist and objectivist” doctrine, reduced to a number of descriptive propositions systematically to be tested against reality. To him, this smuggles idealism back in because it requires reality to be structured like a mind for propositions to picture it: “the positing of the superiority of the concept of matter over mind is only the positing of the superiority of the concept.” He points out that Marx rejects both vulgar materialism and idealism as variants of the same error: the “position of contemplation.” Ideas aren’t representations but practices. “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking” is practical: practice doesn’t test ideas, but “ideology only has reality insofar as it expresses itself in practice.” What follows? “There is no objective Marxism” — it and Marxist ideology are “ways of structuring our practices,” and the final call is to “embrace existential pathos.”

Sarkozy’s piece focuses on critiquing Marxists. Marxists recognize knowledge is historically determined, yet background this and become “part-time positivists and part-time conspiracists.” Marx is canonized as an exceptional scientist rather than a critic of the thing science has become. Conspiracists is meant in Gramsci’s sense: when “’Critical’ activity is reduced to the exposure of swindles, to creating scandals, and to prying into the pockets of public figures” and then concluding “the bourgeoisie did it!” Thereby, Marxism is turned “into the ‘best’ conspiracy theory rather than a historical-practical critique.” Sarkozy also stages what he calls the positivists’ hardest question to the constructionists — if knowledge is socially produced all the way down, should they reject the results of cancer research? — and never returns to it. The question is the realist’s. Positivism only counted as knowledge that which observation could settle; Sarkozy’s question stakes the findings on the mechanisms that produce the observations, with success as the criterion: if the treatment works, the findings hold. In the critical theory Sarkozy draws on, the label means treating established facts as self-evident and beyond challenge.

He then assembles an ensemble with which to combat this. Althusser supplies the problematic, which Sarkozy glosses as “an underlying structure, ontologically grounded in history, that dictates what questions can even be posed” — his formulation, not Althusser’s — alongside an argument that Marx changed the terrain with the claim that knowledge is produced rather than extracted. Latour supplies the object/thing distinction and the conversion of matters of fact into matters of concern: a matter of fact is a claim presented as finished and free-standing, cut loose from everything that produced it; treating it as a matter of concern means putting back the instruments, funding, controversies and stakes that hold it up, and the people it matters to. (Thing against object is the old sense of the word — an assembly, something convened.) Sarkozy invokes Peirce to define truth as what a competent community of inquirers settles on after indefinite investigation, and then Dewey, turning that community into a democracy. Sarkozy summarises Horkheimer as making the detached activity of the scientist “a specialized function within the social division of labor and the productive process,” so that facts are “socially performed,” while Horkheimer’s own words give the critical theorist a “dynamic unity with the oppressed class.”

Kateb replies that this is idealism in which “practice” substitutes for “spirit,” disarming us exactly where science needs defending. What he puts in its place is an activist conception of knowledge, which he finds as a thread in the Marxist classics and, in part, in philosophers like Harré and Hacking: we know the world by intervening in it rather than by picturing it, and what makes that knowledge answerable to anything is that our tinkering elicits “responses that are not under our control, responses that can therefore surprise us.” Realism without representation.

I agree that “everything is practice” doesn’t survive contact with a house. A practice is a relation, and relations have relata. If you build something, there’s you, and there’s the building. Either the claim denies the relata, or it equivocates. Vulgar pragmatism dies on his two counterexamples: true and useless (how many hairs are on Trump’s head?), useful and false (original sin as apologia for class rule). And he’s right about the danger in the Peircean move as Geese runs it: once a community’s settlement is what makes a claim true, the composition of that community becomes an argument about the truth, and that argument is very easy for the other side to run.

In fairness to Gandakin, there is one point Kateb doesn’t engage; Gandakin pre-empts the idealism charge with Laclau’s definition, in which what distinguishes idealism from materialism is “its affirmation of the ultimately conceptual character of the real,” and then explicitly refuses to make the real conceptual. He argues that activity is non-conceptual, not that reality is mind. That doesn’t rescue “everything is practice” from the relata problem, but it does mean the critique needs to be more specific than “you swapped in a word.” Kateb’s complaint that the term is used 148 times and never defined is the fairer hit. His second letter goes at the passage quoted above, formalising it as a five-assumption reductio and arguing that the conclusions don’t follow. On his own reconstruction (which he concedes may not be the argument Gandakin intended), the step that decides it is clean: structural identity between world and mind, even if it were granted, would not give sortal identity, and his example of a doll house makes the point. But that is a defence of materialism against Gandakin’s charge, not an answer to Gandakin’s defence against the charge of idealism, which nobody has yet taken up.

Thus, Kateb stops one move short, at the place where his opponents grope towards something real.

Two Levels, Not One

Organizational form governs which questions get asked and whose knowledge counts. The world’s resistance governs which answers survive.

The Geese authors collapse the second into the first: if the community’s settlement is truth, there’s no further role for the world. Kateb keeps the two apart and lets only the second bear on knowledge: since the world adjudicates, the sociology of who asks becomes a distraction from the epistemology: real as a subject, inert as a condition on knowing.

Both moves lose something costly. Kateb’s is the subtler loss, and his second letter is where it becomes visible, because there he grants the first level in so many words. Under the heading of historical materialism about science, he lists institutionalism: research is “conducted by persons of a certain class in the context of certain institutions, economic and political,” and “these institutional forms shape and mediate research, e.g., the questions posed and investigated, the experimentation conducted.” Alongside it sit scientific knowledge as commodity, as state force, as ideology, and a dialectic of causes internal and external to scientific work. So the objection cannot be that he is missing a level. The last of those even name the connection I am about to say is absent. But naming a joint is not an account of one, and the test is what it allows him to conclude about a currently constituted inquiry, which is nothing.

The problem is that he grants it and then quarantines it. The theses arrive “dogmatically,” as a list, under a heading marking them as claims about science as an object of study. And the partition is stated in the same breath: “The truth of scientific knowledge is not a matter of human election, but scientific knowledge itself has a history.” History on one side, truth on the other, and nothing about how the two are connected. And standing itself never appears: the entitlement, conferred by position, to have one’s questions counted as inquiry at all. Having standing differs from being consulted, and it is not ‘seeing what others miss’ either. This is why, when his remedy reaches for participation, there is nothing organizational for it to attach to. That joint is the core of my disagreement with him. I’ll return to it.

Two of his own arguments show what the quarantine costs. Among the propositions he asks us to accept is scientific privilege: “knowledge about that mind-independent [world] which is inter-subjectively binding takes the form of scientific knowledge.” The best reason to accept the propositions, he says, is the no-miracles argument, as any other philosophy of science makes the long-run success of science a miracle. Grant no-miracles everything it asks. It buys the approximate truth of the theories that worked. It cannot buy privilege, because privilege is not a claim about theories at all. It is a claim about which form of organized inquiry is entitled to produce binding knowledge, and an argument from the track record of the inquiry we happen to have cannot settle that without assuming it. Privilege names the gate, i.e., who is licensed to produce authoritative knowledge, and installs it as a premise. The Kerala Sashtra (KSSP), which initiated India’s People’s Science Movement, is one case I will discuss later; it shows what is at stake. A movement organization that exists separate from the universities produced work by the same standards of evidence that the universities use. Because the privilege thesis says nothing about who decides which inquiries count as scientific, that decision stays with the institutions already making it.

Kateb’s technological argument for entity realism is isomorphic. It turns on scientific knowledge leaving the laboratory and being used “in development, production, and use of technologies, instruments and machines, shaping the lives of those unaware of any deeper workings.” The people on the receiving end appear as evidence for realism and never as inquirers. The whole question of standing arrives as a subordinate clause.

The cost on the Geese side is the one they’d feel first. It isn’t the denialism Latour was concerned with. If facts just are what a community assembles, you can no longer say that the current partition of knowledge is wrong about the world. All you can say is that it’s differently assembled. Bhaskar called this the epistemic fallacy. Its consequence is direct: if the world is just what we experience, dividing experience into departments looks like dividing the world at its joints, making the disciplinary map unfalsifiable because there’s nothing underneath that it fails to track.^[2] Antirealism doesn’t just disarm against Republicans, but also against the university.

Latour’s framework makes this worse. Flat ontologies cannot distinguish facts that persist because they track something real from facts that persist because of the social power of the networks producing them. That distinction is necessary to be able to argue that the wall between economics and sociology is strong because it is class-functional (a claim I guardrail below) while the second law of thermodynamics isn’t. Without it, “matters of concern” is redescription rather than critique.

This is also why Latour never seriously applied his most explicitly political diagnosis to his own empirical practice, namely in the Gorgias chapters of Pandora’s Hope^[3], where he points out that capital-S Science is “a political weapon to do away with the constraints of politics.” His pamphlet Down to Earth names ruling classes throughout and Exxon once, and is free of Actor-Network Theory vocabulary.^[4]So the Geese authors lose the distinction, and Kateb turns it into a partition. Both readings assume that if the levels are distinct, they can be treated one at a time. Ludwik Fleck’s work makes the sustained argument that they can’t, and I will discuss how he held them together below. The cost of treating them one at a time is visible in a case Flores describes. One early modern radical scientist Fleck also discusses is Paracelsus, who came to medicine as a medic in the mines, and attacked the distinction between manual surgeons and physicians who never touched a body: the hand and the head joined in a person, with a movement of folk healers behind him. The first level moved while the second didn’t. Fleck’s own example of a closed system of opinion, in which new ideas “would be reinterpreted to make them conform,” is Paracelsian medicine. Agreement can’t do the world’s job, and better facts can’t do organizations.

Sarkozy Has the First Level and Reaches for a Peirce Who Won’t Give it to Him

Sarkozy makes Althusser and the Peirce he reaches for pull in opposite directions, and never comments on it.

The problematic is not something a community agrees on. It’s “ontologically grounded in history”; it “dictates what questions can even be posed in the first place.” It works on inquirers whether or not they consent to it or are aware of it. That’s how classical economists produce correct answers “to a question that has just one failing: it was never posed.” Althusser gives Sarkozy a structure that governs inquiry from outside. That’s the first of the two levels.

Then Peirce arrives to do the second level’s job, and does it with the settlement of the community, which is a body on the first. That puts the inquirers back in charge of what Althusser just said they don’t control. You can have Althusser’s terrain or a community whose agreement constitutes truth; adopting both means silently canceling the first.

The problem here is that the second of those isn’t the real Peirce, as Clara S. points out in response to Kateb^[5], and the gap between them is where the whole problem lives. Peirce’s truth is not agreement. It is what survives doubt (until some “surprising or recalcitrant experience” unsettles it), and it is stated counterfactually, not historically. Misak’s rendering is “if, if inquiry were pursued sufficiently far, then H would be believed, then H is true.” The community doing the believing has no definite limits; it is the entirety of inquirers, not a body you could convene, fund, or count. And the apparatus is realist throughout. It requires a world independent of any particular inquirer or community of them, because that independence is what pushes back and what makes inquiry necessary in the first place. On the thing-in-itself, Peirce ends up nearer to Engels than to anything Geese wants from him.

Kateb’s objections don’t land on Peirce, though they do land on Sarkozy: fallibilism already predicts that there is no ideal community, that past agreements turned out to be bunk, that no inquirer is eternal. Read straight, Peirce and Althusser can pass through the same door: a structure that governs inquiry from outside, and a truth no inquirer controls. What cancels Althusser’s terrain is the actualization: the step from a counterfactual community without limits to a real one with an address. Dewey takes that step in the open when he turns the community into democracy. Sarkozy inherits it without comment. Once taken, the settlement of a named body becomes constitutive of truth, and Kateb’s complaint bites.

The actualization is also not an accident. A regulative counterfactual cannot be the community a political project organizes; the moment you want Peirce to underwrite a program, you need an actual body, and the slide is already underway. Clara S.’s closing judgment, that she would not in any world make Peirce the foundation of a magazine’s political project, is right for these reasons.

Sarkozy’s Horkheimer has the same problem. The structural claim is that scientific work is a specialized function of the division of labour: it generates positions, careers and standards of evaluation whatever their occupants believe about objectivity. The remedy (”dynamic unity with the oppressed class,” as Horkheimer puts it) asks those occupants to change their allegiance. But if the arrangement produces the standards regardless of belief, allegiance is not the lever. A scientist who switches sides in their heart still holds the same funded post, publishes to the same referees, and is judged by the same criteria. Sarkozy takes over both halves without noticing that the first disqualifies the second — which is the substitution of allegiance for organization that I take up below.

The Missing Spine

In 1935 the Polish-Jewish serologist Ludwik Fleck published Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact in Basel. There were 640 copies.^[6] It held together three things generally kept separate: the social production of knowledge, the material resistance of reality, and the structural determination of cognition by collective organization. Initiation into a discipline trains directed perception, i.e., the readiness to see certain things and not others. Authoritative handbooks govern “the decision on what counts as a basic concept, what methods should be accepted, which research directions appear most promising.” That’s the active side. The social production of knowledge and the shaping of what its producers can perceive are not one and the same: organization is what turns the first into the second. But they fall on the same side of the line, because both govern what gets asked rather than what survives being asked. And the second is cognitive, not merely institutional.

Then there are the passive connections: the results that resist arbitrariness, the regularities any investigator has to accommodate regardless of what they believe. Set oxygen at 16, and you don’t get to choose 1.008. Active and passive are inseparable in practice. What Fleck called a thought style is a constitutive condition of cognition, operating against a reality that constrains it.

Fleck survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, but his framework didn’t survive the war in any institutional form. Thomas Kuhn read Genesis and Development in 1949 or 1950, by his own recollection, though he would not cite it in print until 1962. He took the gestalt-switch and dropped the sociology of the collective mind, which he called “vaguely repulsive.”^[7] When Bruno Latour picked Fleck up as “the founder of sociology of science,” he took the social construction of facts and dissolved the active/passive distinction.

The Geese authors inherited Latour’s cut: active connections without passive ones. Kateb defends the passive connections and, for all the sociology of science he grants above, keeps it out of his account of what makes knowledge answerable to anything. His “activist conception of knowledge,” his Harré and his Hacking, his “interventions into the world, our tinkering that elicits responses that are not under our control, responses that can therefore surprise us” are Fleck’s passive connections restated in analytic idiom more than half a century later. But Fleck’s passive connections are style-indexed: which of the world’s resistances you will be able to notice and care about depends on what collective you were trained into. Kateb’s surprise is first-personal, a property of our tinkering. He wants a nonrepresentational defense of realism that was deliberately dismembered in predictable ways.

Kuhn’s cut was a choice about what he wrote: a physicist doing Cold War history and philosophy of science in a field whose gatekeepers treated sociology of knowledge as a Marxist category violation, with no training that would’ve made it recoverable. Latour’s was a research program built on a principle of symmetry: the claim that won and the claim that lost must be explained in the same terms, so that you never explain a claim’s success by saying it’s true. This bought real descriptive gains because it lets you follow controversies while they are live, without knowing who will turn out to be right. But that symmetry was defined against the active/passive distinction, so keeping the distinction wasn’t on the table. And so each traded half of Fleck for something they found useful. And the trades seemed free, because academic practice imposed zero cost for discarding the other half.

Fleck traced one laboratory concept (the Wassermann reaction) through the collective that produced it. His work shows social shaping and epistemic productivity operating together. His book doesn’t explain why the two are compatible and how they interact. Kuhn and Latour were making general claims: one produced a claim about how science changes as such, the other produced a method intended to apply to any domain. Latour ran multiple case studies as instances of a method, and a method has to state its terms. Those terms are how you can keep the sociology without conceding that agreement makes truth. Absent it, each successor had to build it himself or drop a half, and dropping half is cheaper. Arguing over which fragment matters is what this looks like from the inside.

An absence doesn’t push, though. What pushed was the cost structure around it: dropping a half was free, as it still is, and nobody doing the cutting was answerable to anyone in need of the other half. The last section is about why not. The bisected theory is what these ninety years are missing; it isn’t, by itself, what produced them.

Peirce’s Position Made Concrete

Peirce’s community is a regulative counterfactual, which is what makes it philosophically robust and politically empty. It says that inquiry is irreducibly communal. It says nothing about which community, on what terms, and with whom. That silence is the opening, and it is where the argument stops being about truth and becomes an argument about institutions.

The actual challenge is empirical. Ask who the community is. It’s what Richard Levins called the nomenklatura of science: “the pool of respectables: the people eligible to be named to advisory commissions, invited to give graduation addresses, elected to the leadership of the National Academy of Sciences, run for political office.” Out of this rotation among ruling positions “develop[s] the sense of what is obviously true.”^[8] It’s Fleck’s authoritative handbooks. It’s the funding architecture: patent policy, technology transfer offices, Bayh-Dole enabling the privatization of publicly funded knowledge, career criteria rewarding disciplinary publication and punishing cross-domain work as gimmickry. If that community’s agreement is what produces truth, then truth is a function of the funding architecture. That’s a much harder problem for Sarkozy than “there is no ideal community,” and his Horkheimer section almost goes there. The constraint isn’t uniform either. It binds hardest where careers are staked on it – which is why the interesting cases are bodies whose careers aren’t.

None of this refutes Peirce. It is the specification he never gave, and it belongs on the first level. Differently organized communities produce different knowledge. For example, KSSP produced an assessment of the Silent Valley Hydroelectric project titled “A Techno-Economic and Socio-Political Assessment,” a title the university’s departmental division of labour is not organized to produce. It was produced because KSSP’s membership cross-cuts disciplines and its research is organized around problems rather than departments. It found the irrigation potential of the dam exaggerated, the ecological costs understated, and the project neither unavoidable nor the best immediate solution. Their health movement’s causal model defined health as a function of food, safe drinking water, sanitation, employment, education and housing, where the medical establishment defines it in terms of disease, doctor, hospital, drugs. Same world, same standards of evidence, different questions, because a different set of people had standing to pose them.^[9] No general advantage follows. A thought style is a condition of cognition for any collective, KSSP included: a different composition buys a different set of foreclosures, not none. And it holds only as long as nothing stakes careers on it: a movement whose surveys become the credential for a post has the constraint back.

That’s the two-level account working, and it answers the challenge Sarkozy poses: should constructivists reject cancer research? No, and the health case shows why not. KSSP neither disputed biomedical findings nor lowered standards of evidence. What it contested was the constitution of the object, and it could contest that because its membership gave standing to (rather than ‘consulting’) people affected by the medical definition. In other words, the constructionist question about cancer isn’t whether the oncology is sound; it’s why those who can get cancer don’t have standing to organize the research around the industrial production of carcinogens, and why no such body is in a position to do so. Bodies of roughly that shape have existed, and Flores already described two of them in his 2020 article. The Black Panthers’ health program placed community experts as equals to the medical ones rather than consulting them; the Young Lords, evicted by riot police after occupying Lincoln Hospital, negotiated a space inside it and ran a detox clinic and political education there for several years, until Ed Koch violently ended the program in 1978.

Three Attitudinal Remedies

Kateb’s remedy is twofold. First, “the masses must be better educated on science, and what it means to assess scientific knowledge on its own merits, by its own protocols, given the authority to question it intelligently, but nonetheless participating in the endeavor of determining how things really are.” Second, scientists should organize so as not to be seen as enemies of the people. The second half is a right call, and it is where I think the argument should start. The first is more than a call to be taught at: given the authority and participating are organizational words. But he stops there: nothing says who confers that authority, what endeavor one would be participating in, or what the organizational implications are. And the second letter, for all that it adds on the philosophy, adds nothing here.

Sarkozy’s remedy is to treat facts as matters of concern, enter into dynamic unity with the oppressed class, “reattach” science to the ground of emancipation. No organizational specification to any of it.

Gandakin’s ambiguous remedy, “embrace existential pathos,” is difficult to reconcile with his opening diagnosis. American Marxism became verificationist because “the real social base of Marxism had been erased.” His question “how can a consistent materialist hold that a correct theory can be produced in isolation from a mass social practice” seems to push in the direction of an organizational explanation. But then, why end on a vaguely worded voluntaristic call for readers to (individually? Collectively? He doesn’t say) change their orientation? He even quotes the Engels line that refutes his ending: “before there was argumentation there was action. In Anfang war die Tat.”

Taken seriously, the priority of action over argument is an empirical question about retraining perception, and an empirical question can be put to cases. So let me pair a body whose politics were right but whose organizational form was wrong with one that never designed its politics at all and was shaped by necessity: Chile’s Cybersyn, and Brazil’s Landless Peasant Movement.

Chile’s Cybersyn had correct politics at the architectural level. Stafford Beer’s systems theory was explicitly antireductionist.^[10] He had instructed his engineers to build factory models “with the help and the agreement of workers’ committees.” But what this led to was a “fairly technocratic approach” that as a rule did not involve “speaking to the guy who was actually working on the mill.” Workers “could not have many doubts because it was a highly technical subject.” And the timing charts printed in the study of one factory were “reminiscent of” the Taylorist time studies Chilean workers had struck against in the 1960s. This meant antireductionist theory sitting on top of reductionist measurement practice, and nobody was positioned to flag it: the engineers answered upward, and the mill floor had no channel into the model. Beer’s framework licensed that arrangement by defining control as an information rather than a power problem. Therefore who decides became what information flows where, and the system was bolted onto the factories from above instead of built out of the participation structures already on their floors.^[11]

Compare this with Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Peasant Movement, MST). Because occupied settlements combine legal defense, agricultural knowledge, educational capacity, and political strategy in the same spaces, no disciplinary boundary survives the daily requirement to coordinate them. The integration isn’t an intellectual achievement or design choice. It’s a matter of practical necessity. To me, that seems the materialist version of Gandakin’s anti-contemplation thesis. Practice determines cognition not because practice constitutes reality but because practice forces the kinds of encounters that disciplinary training prevents. And it survives Kateb’s ontological objection because the constraint runs through the world’s resistance rather than through the constitution of objects by human activity.^[12]

Obviously, these cases are not alike. Cybersyn operated less than three years under threat of a coup. The MST has had four decades and a necessity nobody designed. You can’t decide that a movement will need agronomy and legal defense in the same week. Still, three years was long enough to install the timing charts, and the perceptual failure was visible to the workers from the start. But while the tools of MST’s occupations also carry their origins, it matters that the people being measured are also those measuring, so the assumptions come up for decision in the ordinary course of the work rather than through an act of unusual conscientiousness by whoever built the tool. What that changes about the knowledge is where correction can reach. A yield metric that ignores what a settlement actually eats is a bad measure in either case; but when the people who have to eat are in the room when it is read, it gets amended, or the community collapses. Cybersyn, by contrast, was organized in such a way that the misdescription was a parameter nobody was positioned to dispute. That is also what made the arrangement career-proof in a way composition alone does not: the correction doesn’t depend on anyone’s post being safe, only on the users being present when the measure is read. Honest inquiry corrects answers wherever it is done. Only truly democratic organizational arrangements correct the questions.

Organizational form governs cognition because position inside a form is what confers standing to ask. These aren’t blueprints. We can’t copy the MST. We can only ask of any knowledge-producing body whether it reproduces the conditions that did the work here.

Both cases cited here are about the same object: Fleck’s directed perception. Cybersyn’s engineers held the right commitments and still couldn’t see mill workers as knowledge producers. There’s a grain of truth here in the idea that outsiders see what the initiated can’t, and that’s also what’s wrong with it. The workers weren’t the naive party: they had struck against those time studies in the 1960s, and the resemblance was visible from the floor. What they lacked was standing.

Differently trained and positioned perception forms where discipline’s foreclosures don’t run, but it counts for nothing unless something ensures the information is taken into account. The engineers were formally instructed to work with the workers’ committees. But instruction was as far as it went, and instructions don’t retrain perception. Professional training had already selected for people who experience the boundary between technical competence and political responsibility as maturity. The MST example illustrates what reaches it: encounters generated so regularly by the practice that the trained perception has to accommodate them.

A thought style is rarely argued out of its directed perceptions because they are constitutive of cognition within it, and those with standing within the tradition also belong to it. Educating the masses, entering a unity with the oppressed class, and embracing existential pathos all leave that untouched: there’s nothing for them to attach to. They change when practice changes, and what changes practice is organizational form. But it does so at one remove, and this is the part the thesis I started from leaves out. Form governs the rate at which the encounters happen; the encounters do the retraining. Cybersyn was shaped to hide the encounters. So the test of a knowledge-producing body has to be a structural one.

The Conspiracism Charge, Half-Conceded

Sarkozy’s strongest paragraph is also aimed at me.

”The bourgeoisie did it!” as a universal formula; the ruling class as “a class of magicians and hypnotists”; critique reduced, in Gramsci’s words, to “the exposure of swindles.” He’s right that this is what a lot of Marxist writing about science amounts to, and right that it’s self-defeating. Anyone arguing, as I do, that the disciplinary partition serves class rule owes an account of how this isn’t a skeleton key.

First, two guardrails.

Not every boundary that serves someone serves class rule, and not everything short of class rule is innocent inertia. What’s needed is a scale of what is at stake in a boundary’s defense – plus some care about which boundary, because two get run together. There is the boundary between the credentialed and everyone else, which is defended downward. And there is the boundary between disciplines, which is defended sideways, among those who are inside.

Let us consider a scale based on these criteria:

Accommodation. Nobody believes in the boundary, and nobody profits from it. It persists because contesting it costs more than living with it. This is, I think, the modal case in the academy: plenty of people privately think a given partition is arbitrary, and almost nobody has the margin to fight a referee about it.

Tenacity. The boundary persists because thought styles reproduce themselves – training, handbooks, trained perception. Still, no interests are engaged. Geology’s separation from geography sits here.

Position-defense. There are stakes here, and it’s not just about income. Professionals hold what I’ve elsewhere called organizational use values: the capacity to claim others’ work, to control access, to derive standing from position.^[13] Hierarchies are played, and we tend to underplay the way in which people can call a prestige economy arbitrary even as they compete in it. Furthermore, now that professional standing is no longer heritable, and budget cuts are always hiding around the corner, there is a chronic fear of falling. Credential boundaries get policed accordingly, and lay knowledge tends to meet contempt rather than argument. This tier becomes active between disciplines where boundaries are jurisdictions – a monopoly of competence over a domain, with the chairs, journals and referee slots that come with it. Economics policing its border with sociology is jurisdiction; the geology case above is not.

Class-functional. Here a boundary prevents integration that would connect exploitation, legitimation and ecological destruction; identifiable actors defend it asymmetrically, through specific institutional mechanisms, with the pressure tracking that content rather than boundary-crossing as such; and its construction traces to those pressures rather than to professionalization alone. This tier grades disciplinary boundaries. The credential boundary is class-functional too, but by another route – not by holding an integration apart, but by gating who has standing to speak at all.

Two things about this scale. First, it grades what explains the defense, not what arrangements do. Boundaries can be position-defensive in motive and class-functional in effect, which is how the multiplication of professional positions can function as a technique of class rule without anyone having designed it as one. Second, the tiers aren’t sealed off from one another: position-defense is what supplies class function with its manpower, which is why the strong cases need no conspiracy. The stratum doing most of the defending needn’t be part of the bourgeoisie at all. An orthodoxy that keeps a discipline’s chairs, journals, and referee slots in the hands of people trained in it will exclude the class-reconnecting traditions as a by-product of protecting itself, and from the inside the two motives are indistinguishable.

Take economics. What the wall with sociology orphans is a single question: whether distributive shares track power rather than productivity. Economics takes formal-rational action, without discussing the relations of production. Sociology takes meaning, values, and culture, without reference to the economic base. It is defined residually, as the study of the non-economic, analyzing inequality as stratification and mobility without touching the productive sphere. Neither side is positioned to ask the question: is the omission a property of the boundary rather than of either discipline’s contents?

This was not inevitable: Gabriel Tarde’s unified social science would have dissolved the partition, but it lost to Durkheim’s, which offered a disciplinable object.^[14] Nor was Tarde the first to lose that argument. Flores discusses the same defeat a century earlier, when the academy, restored after Thermidor and increasingly focused on what he calls the capitalistic use of science, accelerated specialization and presented a cold shoulder to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s antireducationist science. Class pressure encouraged the desocialisation of economics’ content. The anti-Ricardian reaction (the Historical School first, the marginalists after) was prompted, as Milonakis and Fine put it, “among other reasons, by the appropriation of Ricardian economics by socialists,” and both schools abandoned Ricardo’s principal theoretical tool, the labour theory of value. Gone with it were the categories that had made distribution answerable to a question about power at all: surplus, unproductive labour, and rent as unearned.

Economists still police the border: in the flagship journals, they send 0.3 percent of their citations to sociology while sociologists send 2.3 percent back the other way. And economics is a strong case because its exclusions are content-selective in the way the class-functional tier requires. And after marginal productivity theory was demolished from inside the discipline^[15], it stayed dominant anyway, while the Marxian and Sraffian journals and programs (which raised distributional questions) were marginalized.

The second guardrail is that class pressures don’t determine institutional forms. The same pressure can produce very different arrangements depending on the configuration of actors, capacities and interests, and the differences are what resistance strategies turn on. That’s what stops this analysis from becoming the functionalism where everything alike “serves” and the differences vanish.

What the scale refuses is the inference that any claim directly reduces to ‘it serves class rule.’ Most partition-maintenance work happens through accommodation and tenacity, and while this is encouraged by our living in class societies, this isn’t substantively mandated. Class-functionality, meanwhile, is a function of particular boundaries meeting particular conditions. This makes it different from the formula, and losable. What dissolves a boundary, and what keeps a body that has dissolved one from being reabsorbed, are the questions the MST case raises and this scale has no vocabulary for.

On Denialism

Kateb hypothesizes that class hatred of the scientific knowledge producers is “the genuine cause” of antiscientific thought, and that an “‘objectified’ fact”, by contrast, “demands agency, interpellating an agent.”

The second half of this doesn’t hold. Antiscientific thought has many causes, among them school systems inculcating deference to those positioned as experts, and the evidence is everywhere. Take climate communication, where the BBC spent years giving a settled question false balance. Where the money is easiest to trace, the pattern is measurable: in research on sugary drinks, industry-funded studies reach sponsor-favorable conclusions eight times as often as independently funded ones. Facticity interpellates nobody. What gates whose claims get heard isn’t the ontological status of the fact but the bearing of the claimant and their organizational backing. Kateb’s account has a demand side and no supply side: hatred of the knowledge producers, and nobody manufacturing, funding, or placing the doubt that hatred feeds on.^[16] His second letter supplies half the missing machinery (scientific knowledge as a commodity, “subjected to the imperatives of capitalist competition and accumulation,” and as a state force) and never connects it to his explanation of why anyone disbelieves. The theses sit in the philosophy of science, the diagnosis of denialism sits in the politics, and the two are in the same body of work without meeting. Media owners and advertisers press for a seat at the table and for some kinds of reporting on some kinds of events rather than others, and that shapes whether and how facts get reported at all.^[17] Credentialed bearing – composure, proper diction, the ease that reads as competence – gates who gets heard from outside. That is the position-defense tier turned outward. Bearing is conferred by organizational forms, which is part of why KSSP’s surveys got standing where an individual’s testimony wouldn’t, and why this is fixed through building different bodies rather than better facts. That mechanism doesn’t care about realism, and a late section of Kateb’s polemic (scientists occupying class positions, being paid by defense, pharma and agribusiness, and needing to earn trust) gets him to the halfway point.

The first half – class hatred as the genuine cause – assumes belief is the operative variable, which I think is the standard left mistake. The same assumption drives a related passage. Kateb: “When you do not properly separate those truth-conditions of matters of fact (the truth-conditions being just that things are a certain way independent of human election) from matters of concern (which is a matter of human election) you admit the possibility that a concern is not warranted, for it is not a fact (I can choose that such and such a fact is true since it was simply the effect of a community determining it so, and I do not trust that community).”

This is too quick, although the distrust is grounded, and grounded distrust is what the manufactured doubt above is made out of. People distrust the science because they’re aware that sections of the bourgeoisie and bureaucrats generally hide behind “science” (or “treaty requirements,” “policy” or “the law”) to make some courses of action seem inevitable and thus easier to implement, because resistance feels futile or atavistic when your resistance is explained as “unscientific”. For a decent chunk of the population, this doesn’t pass muster, even if most can’t name the causal chain. The distrust deepens because scientists with a platform are generally unwilling (or too politically feckless) to admit that “Science” is selectively invoked to further political agendas, and that most scientists with media access are there because their input at the very least doesn’t threaten big business. Climate antiscience also resonates for a related reason; part of the working class depends on the fossil industry for work. A much larger part is on the receiving end of the austerity that gets sold as “climate policy,” and has the same kind of reason not to go along with the reporting: denying the Science looks like the way to undermine the basis of the policy.

This bears on the shape of Kateb’s explanation. He’s interested in what belief produces the behavior: hatred of the knowledge producers, generating rejection of what they say. But most of the compliance that keeps the fossil order running isn’t belief-shaped. People who fully accept the science still have to drive everywhere, cool and heat their homes, and rely on other fossil-fueled technologies, and are correspondingly reluctant to support political changes that look costly or risky. Accommodation in Therborn’s sense, foreclosure, and produced ignorance carry the load, as I’ve pointed to here.^[18]

This is also why the denial that gets measured in surveys is a poor guide to what would change if it vanished. What loosens the foreclosure is what loosened it for the MST, where the foreclosed encounters become routine. That explains the foreclosure but not the dependence: routine encounters retrain a trained perception; they don’t give anyone an alternative to driving to work. Surveys ignore that. And it is where the Peircean apparatus, correctly stated, runs out. Clara S. is right that Peirce wasn’t interested in an individual’s doubt about climate change being real, and that the truth of climate change is perfectly stable in the terms that matter to him. That is the trouble. Manufactured doubt doesn’t touch truth-value and does touch who gets heard, and a theory built to be indifferent to the first has nothing to say about the second. The silence is principled rather than accidental.

Jekyll and Hyde

There’s also a structural reason philosophy of science went peripheral for Marxists. In 1931, at the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in London, a Soviet delegation of working scientists and science administrators made a coordinated intervention: Hessen mapping Newton’s Principia onto the technical demands of navigation, mining and artillery; Zavadovsky arguing antireductionism without vitalism; Bukharin introducing theoretical practice as accumulated and condensed practice, “itself qualitatively a special, theoretical practice.”^[19] It was a manifesto, enabled and shaped by state sponsorship rather than broad standing. What no one there had was an account of how inquiry is shaped by its social conditions while still being answerable to the world: relative autonomy, the joint between the two levels rather than the priority of one of them. Nothing in Hessen’s analysis ofNewton’s work rules that out. It is an account of where the problems came from (the first level) that leaves the second one alone.

That second level did get defended, but in practice rather than in theory: Hessen and Semkovsky were militant defenders of the theory of relativity against the demand for a “dialectical materialist reconstruction,” arguing that relativity was the realization of dialectical materialism. But this is alignment rather than autonomy. It holds that the philosophy and the science agree, and when they diverge, it’s the science that has to give. Physics kept its footing through the 1930s even as individual defenders of the new physics were swept up in the purges; biology lost both the field and its people.

The usual account of what happened next is philosophical: the gap between problem-setting and problem-solving was the space Lysenko drove into, on ground that had already been prepared: “proletarian science”; the demand for immediate, practical results; the inheritance of acquired characteristics; and the conflation of philosophical and political deviation. But there’s also a simple organizational reading: the party-state that dispatched the 1931 delegation had Hessen and Bukharin dead within the decade, and ultimately installed Lysenko. A body that commissions a theory sets the limits of what that theory may say, and it does not need continuity of staff to do it: the limit belongs to the position, not to whoever occupies it. Flores, whose sympathies run with the Bogdanov-Caudwell-Gramsci project of building knowledge production from the workers up, arrives at the same mechanism from the other side: class origin “became a stand-in for loyalty to the party.”

Helena Sheehan’s history of the tradition records a movement in the aftermath: the congress mattered more abroad than at home, and the current that formed in Britain around Bernal, Haldane, Needham and Levy had carriers of its own, including the Cambridge Scientists’ Anti-War Group and the Association of Scientific Workers. That current also reproduced the same defect in a different key. Haldane’s dialectical materialism illuminated “all events whatever from the falling of a stone to a poet’s imaginings,” and Sheehan, quoting Werskey on Bernal, writes that “never had Frederick Engels’ famous notion of ‘scientific socialism’ been treated so literally.” Alignment again, this time with a broad organizational base under it. Werskey’s history of the scientific left records that the Association organized technicians as well as scientists, and that by the postwar period its growth was principally among technicians rather than science graduates. But the union was bargaining over pay and conditions and the Cambridge group was campaigning against the war uses of science, and practices like those generate encounters about employment and about weapons, not about who has standing. Neither working day imposed a cost for leaving the other half out. Carriers are not enough on their own; what matters is what their practice makes anyone answerable for.

The exception is Christopher Caudwell, whose synthesis in the unfinished The Crisis in Physics Sheehan rates “more total, more tightly integrated, more firmly grounded in science” than anything in Lukács, Korsch or Gramsci.^[20] He was killed in Spain, still in his twenties, leaving twelve chapters of which the first six were “in comparatively finished form” and the remaining six “mainly in rough draft and without chapter headings.” Sheehan notes that his philosophical contribution fell into oblivion and never received a full-scale assessment. So the theory was not only unfinished; it was never weighed.

What it contains bears on the argument here. Caudwell separates two tiers inside science. The first is a “general theory or philosophy of mechanism, which the bourgeois scientist adopts unconsciously” and which is “common to all sciences.” This is the specialized theory a science takes directly from its own practice: in physics, the case he works, one that “from time to time contradicts this theory and leads to its improvement.” The second is answerable to the world on its own account, and it accumulates: “practice with its specialized theory has in each department so contradicted the general unformulated theory of science as a whole that in fact the whole philosophy of mechanism explodes,” though only given “a certain ripeness in the categories.”^[21] What the explosion yields is not an integrated world-view but the fragmentation this article is about: science “dissolves into fragments,” and scientists take refuge in empiricism, in eclecticism, or in a specialization “in which all the world is reduced to the particular specialized theory of the science with which the theorist is practically concerned.” That is not the compatibility half, where Fleck is the stronger of the two, and Caudwell never says why practice should be truth-tracking, which is why the theory is still missing by the end of this piece. What it is, is the interaction: a frame the class supplies, a practice with a corrective logic of its own, and a mechanism by which the second breaks the first. The shape is the rate-and-encounter claim above, with the difference that what gives way in Caudwell is a world-view rather than a trained perception, and what follows the break is anarchy rather than retraining.

The one time the tradition took it up at length — the Modern Quarterly “Caudwell Discussion” of 1951, at the high tide of Lysenkoism — Cornforth and Bernal called his credentials as a Marxist into question, on the grounds that he was too favourable to Freud, Einstein and the geneticists. Sheehan’s verdict is that the episode revealed more about the state of British Marxism than about Caudwell. The closest thing to an assessment tested the science against the philosophy, and the men with the organizational base ran it.

Sebastiano Timpanaro’s diagnosis is of the strand that took over the Western academy afterwards^[22]: Western Marxism defends itself against the accusation of materialism. Each time a new philosophical fashion arrives, Marx is reshaped to fit it, with the remainder being thrown in Engels’s lap. But the fashion-following is the symptom, produced by the fact that Western Marxism was written from inside universities, by people whose working day contained no movement body that would have generated the encounters a materialist theory of knowledge needed. That is Gandakin’s erased social base, and it applies to the theorists at least as much as to the doctrine. The missing theory would’ve needed to be a materialist theory of knowledge, which is what the tradition was busy apologizing for. So it was not picked back up.

This missing theory is still missing. Gandakin & Sarkozy’s pragmatism is a late instance of the retreat; Kateb’s polemic is a rerun of the Lenin-and-Ruben defense against it. Both have the same origin: lacking an account of relative autonomy, what’s left are “science is bourgeois” and “science is true” — the tradition’s Jekyll and its Hyde. What the above history shows isn’t a regular oscillation but one defect reproduced under different carriers; this exchange’s two poles are its current form.

Kateb’s list is the closest anyone in the exchange comes, and close enough to show what is absent. He has built the tools: a realism about structures and kinds on one side, and on the other a sociology of the institutions that fund, commodify, and deploy what those tools produce. That realism is also where Sarkozy’s hardest question pointed: he stages it as the challenge he never answers, while Kateb occupies it as a position he defends, with neither recognizing it in the other. But the sociology is assigned to a different inquiry (historical materialism and class analysis are “indispensable to its study as a social phenomenon,” which is someone else’s job), and he leaves the two unconnected. That is a recognisable position rather than an oversight, and not a new one. It is where Bhaskar ended up: the conceptual apparatus built correctly, the organizational question acknowledged and then located in another department. Getting the tools right and bracketing the question of what kind of body is using them is the failure this exchange keeps reproducing.

The way out isn’t picking sides. It’s the two-level structure: reality constrains what any collective can successfully hold, and organizational form governs the rate at which anyone runs into these constraints. Ask any knowledge-producing body who sets its questions, who has standing to judge its answers, how regularly its own practice generates the encounters that disciplinary training forecloses, and what keeps that arrangement from being absorbed by the institutions around it or broken up by them. Answering those four is what an account of relative autonomy would amount to. Fleck had both in one book. And since then, ninety years of successors kept one while dropping the other, dropped the one book that held both, or held both with nothing running between them. Flores set out the organizational one six years ago, down to the bodies the second half needs, such as the clinics mentioned earlier. The present exchange is arguing the epistemological half as though the first were somebody else’s subject.

I am working on a longer piece on knowledge production: how domain separation and reductionism complement each other, what are the organizational conditions for cross-domain knowledge production, and why the Marxist tradition, Bhaskar, Latour and Cybersyn’s engineers all ran aground at the same place. Until then: Kateb has the better ontology, Gandakin has the better instinct about the priority of action over argument, Sarkozy has the better question and the wrong theory of truth to answer it with.

1. Jibreel Kateb, “Letter: Anticipation of Criticism,” Cosmonaut, 22 August 2026. The letter reconstructs the Gandakin passage quoted in part below as a five-assumption reductio and argues its conclusions invalid, then sets out, in a series of headed lists, a scientific realism, a set of Marxist specifics in the philosophy of science, and seven theses of historical materialism about science. All quotations from Kateb below that are not from the August 13 polemic are from this letter.

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2. Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008; first published 1975). The epistemic fallacy (the reduction of questions of being to questions of knowledge) is developed there against empirical realism.

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3. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), especially the chapters on the Gorgias.

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4. Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). The monographs on the other side of the contrast: Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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5. Clara S., “Letter: Clarifications on Peirce,” Cosmonaut, 16 August 2026. The subjunctive rendering quoted above is Cheryl Misak’s, Truth and the End of Inquiry, quoted in Clara S.’s letter quotes it alongside Christopher Hookway’s gloss that what Peirce commits us to is “that the proposition in some form will survive future inquiry.” The phrase about a community “without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase in knowledge” is Peirce’s, also quoted there. Misak, Hookway and Peirce are cited here at second hand, from that letter.

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6. Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, ed. Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton, trans. Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979; First published 1935). The authoritative-handbook passage and the active/passive distinction are both from this text; the Paracelsus example and the quoted phrase are at 31.

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7. Kuhn’s reaction is recorded in his own foreword to the 1979 English edition cited above.

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8. Richard Levins, “One Foot In, One Foot Out,” Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists, ed. ed. Sigrid Schmalzer, Daniel S. Chard, and Alyssa Botelho (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), 31-35.

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9. M. P. Parameswaran, ed., Science for Social Revolution: A Reader (Thrissur: Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishath, 2013), compiled for KSSP’s golden jubilee; the core document is part 1, B. Ekbal and T. M. Thomas Isaac, “Science for Social Revolution,” 9-51.

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10. Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), the source of the quoted material in this paragraph.

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11. The engineers’ side of this is ordinary compartmentalization. “I just do the science” is the laboratory form of a moral shield that runs through every institutional role under class rule – the same cognitive operation, the same incentive structure – which I discuss in Just Doing Your Job.

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12. I develop these cases in Why Competing Solidarities Tend to Win; see its source list for more.

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13. On the stratum’s stake and what makes it fierce – see More to Lose Than Our Chains, especially its treatment of the PMC debate.

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14. On the desocialisation of the discipline and the residual constitution of its border with sociology, Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine, From Political Economy to Economics: Method, the Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Economic Theory (London: Routledge, 2009); the anti-Ricardian reaction and the abandonment of the labour theory of value at p. 33. On Tarde’s defeat by Durkheim, Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lépinay, The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde’s Economic Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009). Tarde was politically reactionary, and the point is the contingency of the partition, not the merits of his programme. The citation figures are from Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan, “The Superiority of Economists,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 89-114.

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15. Paul A. Samuelson, “A Summing Up,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 80, no. 4 (1966): 568–83. Samuelson grants that the reswitching results “teach us to suspect the simplest neoclassical parables” (574) and that the critics (Pasinetti, Morishima, Bruno-Burmeister-Sheshinski, Garegnani) “merit our gratitude” (582); the headaches line is at 583. On how the internal refutations were kept out of the teaching pipeline, Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?, rev. and expanded ed. (London: Zed Books, 2011); on the exclusion of the heterodox programmes and journals, Frederic S. Lee, A History of Heterodox Economics (London: Routledge, 2009).

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16. The machinery is best documented in the domains where the money is easiest to trace. See Marion Nestle, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat (New York: Basic Books, 2018), for the figure above (from the 2007 review of more than two hundred studies of sugar-sweetened beverages) and for the capture of the professional bodies that advise the public; Sergio Sismondo, Ghost-Managed Medicine: Big Pharma’s Invisible Hands (Manchester: Mattering Press, 2018), on the pharmaceutical industry’s ghost-management of the clinical literature — as many as 40 percent of articles on recently approved drugs in the more prestigious medical journals.

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17. See, for instance: Knight Science Journalism @MIT, “Report Says BBC Journalists Mislead with False Balance in Climate Change Coverage,” accessed 31 August 2026, https://ksj.mit.edu/tracker-archive/report-accuses-bbc-journalists-of-false-balance-in-climate-change-coverage/.

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18. Borrowing Göran Therborn’s argument.

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19. The interventions are collected in Science at the Cross Roads (London: Kniga, 1931); for the episode and its aftermath, including the British current and Caudwell below, see Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History — The First Hundred Years (London: Verso, 2017; first published 1985); the manuscript history of The Crisis in Physics is from Hyman Levy’s included introduction.

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20. There is a Cosmopod discussion of it from the first months of the covid lockdowns that introduces the book here: Christopher Caudwell and the Crisis in Physics: A Discussion.

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21. Caudwell, The Crisis in Physics: the two tiers and the explosion at ch. III, § “The Explosion of Theory”; the ripeness condition at ch. II, § “The Metaphysics of Science,” where it is stated of the genius who “fills these categories with content—a degree which may even result in their explosion.” Cited by chapter and section: the digital text of my Verso epub isn’t paginated. The grammatical slip in “which from time to time contradict” is Caudwell’s.

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22. Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism, trans. Lawrence Garner (London: NLB, 1975).

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