How can the working class take hold of the forces of science, today held under the sway of corporate and imperialist interests? The Scientific Workers Collective offers a potential way forward. 

Introduction

“Believe the science” has been a rallying cry of a certain liberal tendency in response to the rightwing reaction to the climate catastrophe and the COVID-19 pandemic. Anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and every variety of dangerous denialist make the liberal impulse to invoke the authority of science seem vital. After all, the process of scientific knowledge production and evidence gathering is one of the most powerful social tools we have for understanding the world and improving human conditions. However, the simple soundbite of “believing the science” obscures within it different meanings for different speakers. The phrase could refer to the scientific knowledge of germ theory, the politics of vaccine production, the self-interest of universities and corporations, and the policies of those in government who believe the science of climate change so much so that they prepare to treat it as a “national security issue”¹. “Believe the science” appeals to scientific authority without reckoning with the many ways in which the science of the present is not only flawed, but is structured in the interests of the upper class. Because of this, the listener has no way of disentangling the faces of science: science as enterprise, and science as method.

We can start by disambiguating enterprise and method, and laying out what we mean by science. As it stands, “science” often refers to the enterprise of science, the economic entities of the academy, industry, and government that put science into practice. However, we can also consider other definitions of science: science as the labor that is required to produce knowledge, science as a technology of knowledge production implemented within a community, and science as the organized collective knowledge of a society, which can take many forms.

This critique is not to challenge scientific knowledge per se, or to give into the depraved epistemological nihilism of the right, nor to promote anti-scientific ways of thinking. Far from it. Rather, the institution of science needs a reckoning precisely because of its importance to society in understanding and shaping our world. The institution of science does not currently behave in the interests of the people. Indeed, in many ways it is decadent. Universities endlessly corporatize, the fruits of academic labor become patentable innovations of which drug companies may profit, military spending is bloated and unimaginably violent, and working class people see shrinking returns in medicines and technologies that actually benefit them if they even have access to it at all. Rather, the best they can hope for is yet another shiny, expensive iPhone.

Indeed, the enterprise of science seems to realize it is in crisis, even if it lacks the language to fully describe its own shape. In the academy, tuition climbs ever higher while the ranks of tenure-track faculty decline every year. Crises of reproducibility and scientific ethics rear their heads in every field, while the pace of funding, publishing, and egocentric career-building means that no one has the time to do much but fret about it. Meanwhile, industry research that does not even pretend to be democratic or public-spirited grows and grows, pouring money into the development of drugs too expensive for all but the rich. These crises are not unlinked, but rather manifestations of a science that operates in the interests of the ruling class. This is not the way it must be. Here, we first consider how the enterprise of science is currently formulated. Then, we propose measures by which scientific workers may build cooperation and solidarity. Lastly, we begin to envision a revolutionary science, proposing steps workers in the current moment can take to transform the science of the present into a science of the people.

1) Science in the hands of the ruling class: The formulation of modern science

If we believe that science is not a rote and unquestionable authority, but rather a mode of knowledge production situated within societies, then we understand that scientific knowledge takes on the character of the relationships by which it is produced.² Partly for this reason, we would like to take the time to explore the nature of these relationships, how they function, and what is their purpose in our society as it stands. This analysis lets organized workers not only understand the conditions under which they labor, but also understand how to effectively resist, halt, co-opt, and seize the means of scientific knowledge production.

Science in its current form has many faces, which we will attempt to examine through two lenses: the increasingly corporatized university, and the privatization of research by the industrial sector. 

The neoliberal university

The past fifty years have seen numerous changes to the public university, which have transformed the academy into an increasingly corporate enterprise. This shift is attributable to a number of factors: declining graduation rates and rising tuitions, federal and state tax cuts which reduced public expenditure on higher education and basic research from 7.2 percent of budgets (in 1972) to 4.9 percent (as of 2014), and a sharp decline in the ability of Pell Grants to cover university expenditures.³

The result has been a university system that increasingly functions like a corporation, where student customers pay for the service of an educational experience⁴, administration seems to expand endlessly and without purpose⁵, and the number of tenured faculty decline while the disposable labor pool of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and contingent faculty vastly outstrips any promises of future careers. This is not hyperbole: in the past two decades, the creation of doctoral students alone has far outstripped available tenure track positions.⁶ Likewise, a 2012 NIH working group found that from 2005 to 2009, 100,000 new biomedical doctoral degrees were granted, while only 16,000 tenure track faculty positions were available.⁷ The ratio of PhD students and postdocs to tenured faculty positions has only grown in recent years as the number of doctorate recipients tracks roughly with employment trends and faculty positions decrease.⁸ Meanwhile, contingent teaching faculty more than doubled from 1995 to 2011. The rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty, for comparison, increased by only 9.6 percent.⁹ What all of this results in is in a huge cheap labor base to whom the university makes no commitment to provide real future stability. This cheap labor is both used increasingly for the tutelage of student customers, but also for the enterprise of scientific research. 

The business model for academic research is the production of grants for money. University labor produces grants, with faculty labor particularly responsible, which provide the university with a revenue stream of funding from governmental agencies like NSF, NIH, and DARPA, as well as research foundations. To prove that one’s university is worthy to continue receiving funding, one must incidentally perform scientific research to back up and provide the pilot data for the next round of grants. The vast majority of this research is performed by trainees: that is, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, who on average make well-below average for their education level. For example, PhD students in the biomedical sciences make on average $32,782 annually¹¹ Graduate and postdoctoral researchers are also unlikely to have good healthcare benefits, paid leave, or workload protections.

Furthermore, because of the hierarchical structure of academia, these researchers often have vanishingly little control over their work and workplace. With research funding linked to (but not owned by) individual faculty members, the continued training, research support, and payment of grad students and postdocs are dependent on a single person. The result of this is to allow individual faculty disproportionate power over people who are effectively their employees: not only do they act as managers and supervisors, but have the ability to thoroughly derail career paths. One of the major contradictions in pursuing a master’s or PhD in STEM fields is in the act of training to be a scientist while simultaneously being expected to deliver immaculate precision in new techniques and a quick turn-around of positive results. This imbalance is the locus for much of the abuse and mistreatment found in the academy, as it permits toxic workplace environments with little recourse for accountability, investigation, or escape. By framing exploited academic labor as being simply part of the training of new researchers and scholars, institutions obscure just how reliant they are on the labor of trainees for the fundamental function of the university: teaching and the production of grants.

The relative isolation of individual labs within a university also serves to hinder the building of labor solidarity, both among contingent faculty, graduate workers, and postdocs, but also among tenure-track faculty. Despite being the heads of individual laboratories, tenure track faculty do not represent the capitalist class. The capitalist class owns and controls the means of production, in this case being the funding, space and equipment for scientific research. The tenure-track faculty still perform huge amounts of labor with extremely slim support, while having only a limited say in the governance of the university.¹² In fact, faculty do not even control the grants on which their names are printed – rather, grant money is awarded to the institution, and is simply earmarked for an investigator’s use. Tenured faculty do not control the means of scientific knowledge production, as it were. However, tenure-track faculty present a unique difficulty, in that they have been historically resistant to organizing and unwilling to join arms in solidarity with adjunct or contingent faculty in resisting university exploitation.¹³ A number of factors can explain this: academia’s myth of meritocracy necessarily discourages the building of alliances, as individuals come to believe that their positions are deserved solely through their own virtue while others must have earned their lesser lot. Similarly, individualistic careerism presents a distracting set of incentives counterposed both to true collaborative science, as well as understanding the exploitation of themselves and other workers. Tenured faculty are pinched between the administration’s demands on their labor and the difficulties of acting as a manager over other workers, leading faculty to cleave strongly to belief in meritocracy. This ideology both explains their relative position over others as well as the extreme work they must perform to stay afloat.

Despite typically being the most senior researchers in a laboratory, principal investigators very rarely perform any of the actual research. Instead, their role is to secure continued funding for the institution, while the majority of the labor is carried out by trainees. It is worth lingering on this point: the majority of the scientific knowledge in our society is produced by people who are in training to produce scientific knowledge. There is almost a complete dearth of staff scientist positions, or trained and experienced scientists who have become experts in certain fields and techniques. In a 2012 survey of the basic biomedical research workforce in the United States, NIH found that there were over 25,000 current doctoral students (the vast majority of whom had research assistantships), around 20,000 postdoctoral fellows, and only about 8,500 staff scientists. Furthermore, the number of graduate students and postdocs had been increasing steadily for the past two decades, while staff scientist positions, which require higher pay, plateaued or slightly declined from 2003-2008.¹⁴ 

What’s more, graduate and postdoctoral positions are by their nature temporary. Though the length of the average postdoc has been increasing and increasing (in part due to this bottleneck!), the turnover rate for both grad students and postdocs is necessarily much higher than it is for staff scientists. This disparity in numbers between trainees and staff scientist positions represents an exodus of scholarly talent and training. In many regards, this should present an existential problem for academic research. When the majority of research is done by temporary trainees, the quality of scientific work suffers. When these trainees must also fulfill the roles of lab managers, technicians, and mentors themselves, this represents a serious problem for the quality of lab practices, records, data maintenance, and methods. This issue has also frequently been under-discussed in the context of science’s “reproducibility crisis,” or the inability of many published scientific studies to be reproduced, one of the key tenets of the scientific process.¹⁵ Likewise, obtaining negative results or failing to produce results in line with a principal investigator’s pet hypothesis can also jeopardize a junior scientist’s career. Despite the recognition of this problem, science has largely failed to reckon with its causes: the for-profit role of academic publishing, the churn of the grant cycle, the hyper-focus on individual investigators’ careers, and crucially underdiscussed, the reliance on transient, exploited academic trainees for research labor. 

Lastly, while this section has paid much attention to the “visible” world of the academy, it cannot go without stating that scientific labor is undergirded by far more workers than just bench researchers. In addition to wet lab technicians, the labor of husbandry technicians, veterinarians, maintenance staff, cleaning staff, waste management workers, and numerous others are essential to the enterprise of science. They keep research animals healthy, maintain animal lines, ensure buildings are amenable to experimental work, deal with the hazardous waste products of research, and much more. Their work is undercompensated and under-recognized, but is indispensable to the integrity of the scientific process. These workers are also subject to shrinking wages, cultures of overwork, temporary contracts, and vanishing career prospects. They are also primarily Black and Brown immigrants in comparison to the primarily white “visible” scientific workers. This contributes to the classist and racist power dynamics in the scientific workplace that are promulgated by white supremacy. 

Overwork and exploitation remains an oft-heard story, leading many such workers to leave academic science. But where do these workers go?

Industry: A powerful engine driving nowhere good

Where do all the academic workers end up, if not in staff scientist or faculty positions? The question, of course, is who’s hiring. Currently, 71% of the bachelor degree-holding science and engineering labor force is employed in the business sector, as is 48% of doctorate-holders.¹⁶ The life and health sciences, which award the most Ph.D.s, saw a sharp decrease in tenured academic jobs (down 10 percentage points to 23% of PhDs from 1997 to 2017) with a commensurate increase in Ph.D.s ending up in industry (McDowell & Heggeness, 2017). This trend has been even sharper for math and computer sciences (49% down to 33%).¹⁷

Twin to the corporate academy is the world of industry, which has no illusions about serving the public good. While fleeing academics may potentially find higher pay, shorter hours, and more stability (maybe even an HR department), it is rarely without a touch of disappointment. In part, this is due to an understanding that the research produced under the auspices of corporate enterprise will not enter into public knowledge. Rather, it remains in the grasp of companies, which operate solely for profit. 

Industry encompasses many different sectors – from agriculture to pharmaceuticals to biomechanics to weaponry – that benefit from the wealth of public research without returning anything in kind. Industry co-opts the knowledge generated by the social enterprise of scientific research, channeling it not toward the well-being of the people but instead toward the profit of the few and the maintenance of imperial control abroad. Massive amounts of money, resources, effort, and time are put toward using public scientific knowledge for profoundly anti-public practices by private entities that have no accountability to the people or the environment.

One of the clearest culprits of this is the pharmaceutical industry. From 2010 to 2016, every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the FDA resulted from NIH-funded basic research, a collective 200,000 years of grant funding which totaled more than $100 billion dollars.¹⁸ Companies afraid of losing on their investment tend to stay close to known formulations and targets (termed “me-too” drugs, or small variations on existing drugs), while it is publicly funded laboratories which actually find innovative new targets and formulations.¹⁹ Despite increasing private research expenditures, the number of new drug and device approvals by the FDA has been nearly flat for the last two decades.²⁰ A substantial portion of publicly-funded biomedical research is oriented toward the discovery of drug targets, research is then taken by pharmaceutical companies for the production, manufacture, patenting, and sale of drugs – at least, to those who can afford them.²¹

To put this another way, although pharmaceutical companies may spend large amounts of money ($83 billion in 2019) on research and development, that R&D is supported by a well-spring of scientific knowledge funded or produced by governmental agencies (NIH budget for 2021 was $43 billion, for example)²² Furthermore, price-gouging is endemic: obsessed with turning a profit even at the cost of human lives, pharmaceutical companies charge exorbitantly for everything they can get away with, including even cheap-to-produce, long-since-discovered drugs like insulin. Insulin was discovered in 1923 by Frederick Banting, who refused to put his name on the patent for his life-saving find. Now, it can be manufactured for 2 to 3 dollars, and yet sells on average for four-hundred and fifty dollars.²³

Intellectual property law championed by pharmaceutical companies, as well as many other corporations, denies people the benefits of scientific research as a sacrifice to profits and the maintenance of imperial control abroad. International IP law formulated and enforced by the WTO prevents nations in the Global South from building the capacity to manufacture life-saving COVID-19 vaccines so that Pfizer, Moderna, and Astra-Zeneca (whose vaccine was originally publicly funded until a little push from Bill Gates convinced Oxford researchers to license it) never lose control of their technology and profits.²⁴ Likewise, the patenting of genetically modified seeds helpfully forces farmers to forever tithe to Monsanto, a company which claims to own genomes themselves.²⁵ Companies control who lives and who dies by withholding access to lifesaving medicines, the ability to grow food, and other vital technologies – all to ensure that the flow of cash to corporations of the Global North never ceases for a second.

Scientific labor also undergirds more coercive industries of imperial control. Military R&D funding is over 2.5 times higher than the funding for the National Institutes of Health (an agency whose priorities are also quite worthy of critique).²⁶ Scientific advances are sought and sculpted by the military to be new ways of raining terror abroad: from the atom bomb to Agent Orange, and now to the use of AI and neuroscience for military surveillance, military funding generates new technological knowledge, which then generates profits for weapons contractors and the like, which then generates new horrors abroad. What we see with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) model, for instance, is a governmental entity capable of producing transformative new technologies far more effectively than the private sector, but which is used to ensure U.S.-ian technological supremacy. Only then is this technology privatized by companies which claim discursive rights to “innovation”.²⁷ The Internet and most iPhone technology, for instance, originate from long running DARPA projects, not Silicon Valley venture capital. Of course, this is not to say “you gotta hand it to” DARPA, as what has also emerged from the agency is the military terror of the past 60 years: drone technology, military imaging and surveillance, and laser-guided bombs. Rather, this is further evidence that companies are not the innovative force they claim to be to warrant their high profits; rather, they are vulturous on public research and symbiotic with the imperial state which exists to protect and enable them. 

The manner in which the military-industrial complex functions with respect to scientific labor represents two phases of maintaining imperial control: military funding of research generates knowledge and technologies specifically useful to the military, and the industrial side acts as a stranglehold on any public good that might come out of it, ensuring that the profits can all be privatized and flow ever-upward. The weapons produced to maintain this order are also part of it, although the profit motive and the need for imperial control should be seen as synergistic forces, wherein war profiteers drive further conflict to ensure their business remains successful.²⁸

While there are many ills that emerge from the privatization of the fruits of public research, the corrupting nature of profit on research is useful to highlight. Industry influence shapes basic research toward inquiry and products that can be commodified, shifts results in ways that benefit a sponsor’s product, and shapes the way questions are asked to broadly benefit the sponsor’s interests.²⁹ For instance, Coca-Cola and the nonprofit it funds shifted public health research away from the role of diet in poor health outcomes and toward lack of exercise.³⁰ Similarly, the patent profiles of universities have also been shown to trend toward the interests of their boards of trustees.³¹ What we hope to emphasize is that this is not a problem that is the product of a few bad actors or susceptible scientists, and it cannot be merely done away with through regulation or better watchdog groups. A recent KHN investigation exposed committee members at the National Academy of Sciences had accepted bribes from pharmaceutical companies to understate the scope of drug waste, another instance in a series of similar scandals.³² Private companies – capital – will continue to do what it is in its nature to do, which is to shape all aspects of society to drive further profit. Science as it currently stands is shaped to be a tool for capital, and what it produces will be useful for generating value. What is best for the most people will only ever be a by-product. 

The purpose of ruling class science

Science is a social process, and the nature and application of the scientific knowledge produced are shaped by the social context of its production. The current state of science, situated as it is within intensely hierarchical, profit-driven imperial institutions, is a bourgeois science.³³

The manifestations are dire: From the unreckoned-with history of eugenics in biomedical science, to the field of economics’ happy role in justifying the reconstitution of ruling class power in the post-WWII era, to practices of “extractive science” which take scientific knowledge, genomes, cells, and data from Black, brown, Indigenous, and other oppressed populations while returning nothing.³⁴ Because the purpose of this science is to maintain ruling class power, the knowledge produced becomes what is useful for generating profit, legitimizing authority, and building technologies of domination, social control, and surveillance. 

However, rather than despair at the capitalist stranglehold on science, we should recognize what the ruling class does implicitly: that science is a powerful tool, one capable of incredible feats. What might that science look like when done by and for the people, instead of in the hands of the elite?

2) What can “science” be? What should science become? 

As explained above, science in its current form is controlled by the bourgeois class. Scientific processes of knowledge production are taught and constructed by institutions who have the access to the funding, materials, training, and physical space necessary to perform science – institutions that require a certain degree of privilege and wealth to break into. These institutions can limit the definition of science to their desired structures – impenetrable to those who fall outside this box.

The impenetrability of science may seem ambiguous, but it is undeniable. In order to make any sort of recognized progress in scientific research, one must be connected enough to know how to do so. Often, individuals may not even consider a career in scientific work because the impression that society has of scientific work is distorted: the question of who gets to be seen as rational and who gets to be portrayed as an expert is highly political, and it is no wonder why that image is mostly that of aloof white cisgender, heterosexual men. Once overcoming the obstacle of even considering scientific work, prospective workers may not know how to enter into the world of research or academia. Students who know others who already work in science, or who have had sufficient mentorship to enter scientific research, are at an intrinsic advantage that carries them forward into their careers. In communities where scientific work is not as common of a trajectory, students are not presented with the same opportunities — for research internships while still in high school, for connections with academic professors or principal investigators. To make matters worse, these same established researchers who consider who to onboard into their labs and fund with their grants value this previous experience. Yet this prior experience, or foundation in laboratory skills, is less a reflection of the potential of a prospective scientific worker, and moreso a reflection of the advantages they have. This contributes to the unique class character of scientific work (or at least the perception of it), and compromises the scientific knowledge that is produced.

Since the western world has dominated scientific research since the 20th century ³⁵ it continues to be defined under capitalism. It has been catered by and for the bourgeois. Yet science – and scientific workers – need not live under these limitations. Although scientific thought and practice have been curated to serve the convenience and interests of those in power, it has the potential to be used instead, against them: as a tool for the working class. 

In his essay “Science and the Working Class,” Bogdanov proposes that science is a means of organizing knowledge in society.³⁶ He acknowledges that under the current context, the ruling class controls the dissemination of knowledge — because they control its production through their authority over scientific labor and institutions. Because science has been in the control of the bourgeois, the opportunity to organize science has been squandered. According to Bogdanov, this is because the bourgeois discourage a higher form of “collectivist fraternal cooperation,” which is at the root of working-class movements and unification. 

Because they can make change through power, authority, and wealth, the upper class has had no use in shaping science to function collectively. Yet there is so much power there: Instead of being scattered, erudite, and inaccessible, an organized science could be used as a tool against the ruling class and the power structures that work against the people. 

To this end, an advantage that scientists as a class have is that they are bound together not only by a particular conflict or struggle imposed on them by an oppressor. Scientists as a class are bound by a shared practice of the scientific method, a process that at its core challenges conventional forms of power and knowledge. The intrinsic nature of science is to question authority and authoritarian bases of knowledge. Scientific workers can reject being the tool of the bourgeoisie and work together as a revolutionary class – a group capable of a meaningful revolution.³⁷ Scientific workers have the drive and common ground to bring them together across these arbitrary ivory walls. The question is only: what would that revolution entail?

To uncover the full potential of science as a tool of the people would require a level of organization the current status quo does not allow. The different branches of science are so detached from each other that not only is research not accessible at large, even fellow scientists cannot easily understand research in other fields.³⁸ This is almost the very formula to guarantee stagnation and obstruct collaboration, which would otherwise be at the root of unified scientific organization and cooperation. How can the masses come together when they are siloed behind tall barriers of basic vernacular incompatibility? 

The first priority should be to counter the forces that keep scientific workers apart. The operation of science within capitalism distorts the motivations behind entire scientific research projects: instead of science for the sake of learning or for the sake of societal benefit, projects are motivated instead by a thirst for profit. Much of science in the industrial world faces this conflict of interest. Yet even in academia, the thirst for money also exists: although in this case it is disguised through federal funding and grant applications. Even if granted large sums of funding for research and experimental expenses, staff and graduate students are vastly underpaid. What makes a university, then, so different from Amazon? 

The allocation of funding, often done by the NIH or NSF, also faces the cooptation of the public by private interest. Public institutions do not exist in a vacuum. Their interests are tied to the private profit-driven companies as their cash-flow is found in a giant interconnected network.³⁹ What this causes is unhealthy competition between scientists. While they may operate in the same fields, scientific workers are often wary of sharing their progress, for fear of who presents or publishes the idea first, who gets the credit, the glory, the funding. 

The economic conditions of science are primarily responsible for the issues large and small we see with science and the practice of it. For example, misconduct courses for experimental research will sometimes touch on the pressures that might drive a person to commit misconduct (such as the falsification or fabrication of data). Career advancement, pressure to publish and get results, pressure from principal investigators or senior laboratory members to confirm hypotheses, and negative work environments with inadequate training or mentorship, are often listed as potential influences that might inspire someone to warp the practice of science for personal ends. In our experience, this is where members of the audience might start thinking somewhere deep inside them: “Uh-oh, these pressures sound familiar.”

These ethics courses are always quick to divert these nascent troubled thoughts to consequences: The institution will not have your back. It is your responsibility, as an individual, to bear the weight of systemic pressure on your shoulders and just choose the more ethical choice, or else be strung up as an example to the rest. It’s all on you. Are you concerned about your environment or career, your ability to defy a PI or get a tenure-track position? Come talk to us at one of our many offices. What will we do about it? Absolutely nothing.

Individual ethics and personal accountability are of course paramount. In the practice of science, we have a responsibility to hold ourselves to standards of conduct that are principled and rigorous in order to preserve the integrity of the scientific record. But individual ethical choices exist within a set of choices defined by the system we are in. Personal accountability is not just one person’s issue. It can – and must! – be considered within a context of changing systems to reduce pressures that drive people to commit negative actions. Likewise, we have to disentangle actual scientific malpractice from actions that make an institution legally liable. 

It should not elide us that it is extremely convenient for our institutions to put the onus of ethical responsibility on their individual researchers, while doing nothing about the pressures that surround us. We know people who have lost their funding and been nudged out of faculty positions. We know graduate students and postdoctoral fellows laboring under PIs with unreasonable expectations, who might not encourage misconduct but certainly encourage results.

These pressures are a symptom of science under neoliberal capitalism. When discoveries are attributed to individuals and individuals have careers on the line, it creates the conditions to incentivize misconduct and other anti-scientific practices. The practice of hoarding data emerges from the fear of one’s research being scooped and one’s career derailed. The practice of restricting access to resources or refusing to train new lab members in a technique at which one is skilled both derive from a fear of being dispensable. The hierarchy of laboratories themselves, with single investigators at the top, creates cutthroat atmospheres in which a rotating hierarchy of postdocs, technicians, and graduate students must be extremely reliant on the principal investigator for the continuation of their careers in science. This power imbalance (with little recourse for subordinates) incentivizes the mistreatment of lab members both by principal investigators and by other lab members, as each struggles to get ahead.

Tying discoveries to individual researchers is also counter to the nature of knowledge. When one looks at the history of science, one sees many instances where multiple people around the same time converge on the same ideas. Darwin and Wallace published similar theories of natural selection within years of each other, but Darwin is remembered as the “discoverer” thanks to merely publishing first.⁴⁰ The notion that an individual only “discovers” things by being part of a system of discovery that would have encountered that knowledge with or without that individual researcher is discomforting to some people, but it is simply the case. Science is a collaborative process – laboratories have multiple people in them, each of whom requires the ideas and feedback of their colleagues, and the expertise and support of technologies, husbandry, the people who make cell media, the people who sweep the floors. Because scientific knowledge builds on itself, even a scientist who works in a laboratory by themself is never really alone. They are in dialogue with all those who did research before them. To base an individual’s career on “their” discovery is as nonsensical as praising the tallest droplet of water in a wave.

The ultimate goal should be a science that functions outside of capitalism, where monetary interests do not hinder collaboration. A better science could expect to see the sharing of knowledge and techniques without fear of being scooped or made dispensable. We could make social structures that promote productive dialogue within and between disciplines (surely we can do better than conferences). We could dedicate the intellectual space and time to put equal effort into evaluating the shape and direction of research as we currently put into uncritically doing it. Similarly, a reduction in hierarchies so that trainees are not subject to the whims of individual investigators could look like multiple senior scientists collaborating on research programs, with trainees able to receive mentorship from multiple sources and treated as colleagues with experience and ideas worth hearing. Embedded structures for the development, training, and standardization of techniques would allow for far greater replicability, while the lack of drive to “publish or perish” would allow scientists the time to perform replications (as well as critique and evaluation, which are often treated as volunteer work). 

Yet, even under capitalism: there are incremental improvements to be made. While we cannot change motivations, we can change methods. The strength of experimentation is in repetition, in reproducibility. Yet this cannot be done if techniques and algorithms are kept hidden from each other. Instead of each scientist remaking the wheel on their own — a horribly inefficient tradition — we should establish a medium to share the lessons we’ve already learned with each other. This includes offering open access to papers, codes, and experimental procedures. Without open access, the doors to science will always be restricted to those that are already equipped with the privilege and resources to let themselves in. It should be noted that this must be done in an equitable way, the nuances of which are beyond the scope of this paper.

Even once published, scientific articles are scattered amongst a myriad of various journals. In order for science to function collectively and be accessible, our research, in addition to our people power, need to be organized. This could present itself in a one-stop-shop collection of scientific research, accessible not only to scientists working within officiated institutions, but to the general public — as scientific workers do not all fit under one identifiable mold. 

Also integral to the structure of collaborative, collective science is communication: not all questions can be answered in a publication. Conferences are few and far in between, often inaccessible to those without proper funding. With the advent of virtual communication, though, scientific workers can establish relationships that are built continuously. Current cross-institution communication is often restricted to one, corresponding author, often a principal investigator. Instead, scientific workers need to normalize communication amongst trainees — who, as mentioned above, are often the ones doing the majority of experimental labor. Also necessary is the establishment of communication networks for regular discussions amongst workers. Too much of scientific work is restricted to isolated labs — often who don’t know of each other’s existence beyond photographs on a website. Mass movements require mass people power — and people who exist in isolation from one another sell themselves short of reaching their full potential. 

Critical to the liberation of science is to integrate the work of scientific workers into the communities they serve. Unlike social workers, teachers or farmers, scientific workers are not often part of a community, due to the interests that scientific workers are serving. Although the goals of scientific work are presented as altruistic, the workers do not ultimately report back to the community, but to bureaucracies that are not a part of these communities and indifferent to community needs. Most labs and groups that perform scientific research receive funding from these institutions – the NIH, NSF, DoD, as well as nonprofit foundations and corporations.⁴¹ Labs are judged by these institutions, receive acknowledgement from them, and report their progress to them. The conflict between scientific workers and their communities is not due to where the work is done, or how the public perceives scientific work. The conflict is who the work itself is serving.  In order to be better integrated into the community, the goals of scientific work need to be directed towards the community. The Black Panthers, in their Free Health Center program for the testing of sickle cell disease demonstrated how local organizing can link scientific knowledge and expertise with direct community intervention towards the betterment of public health.⁴²

3) What is to be done

As we have clearly shown in the above sections, the current state of science is one of increasingly atomized individuals driven to produce profit for bourgeois universities, corporations and imperialist endeavors. The drive to publish and generate profit has corrupted science to its core, and the people responsible for this method of scientific pursuit, being the ones who benefit from it, have no reason to change it. These realities, combined with the hollowing of relationships between the general public and scientists, paints a dour picture of what the future of what science looks like. The eldritch god that is capitalism has completely enclosed even the way we examine the world around us within its carapace. Earlier in this document we have laid out some ways that we can affect change within the system. However, to completely reimagine this system, we must take more direct control of the levers of power within science.

Scientists as a whole make up an important portion of the revolutionary working class. Despite being encouraged to remain in our “ivory towers” and keep our work focused within the confines of university, corporate, or NGO settings, it cannot help but be seen plain as day that we sell our labor the same as any others to a few capitalists: the CEO’s and shareholders of companies (CEO’s of biotech make upwards of 400k, 10’s of millions at large companies, while average salary of biotech worker is 60k)⁴³, boards of regents at universities (Boom in higher education administrator payments since the 20th century)⁴⁴, and the military industrial complex⁴⁵ (over 100k scientists work for the DoD⁴⁶). The profit motive that still dominates science, introducing negative outcomes.⁴⁷ Even the professorship, long held to be the pinnacle of scientific achievement, still requires working to extreme degrees⁴⁸ (1 in 3 over 60 hours a week) to maintain the “productivity” that is expected of one in any scientific field. Despite tenure being dangled to professors as the opportunity to escape this stressful work environment, frequently the actual changes in the job related stressors are minimal upon achieving it.  And even an institution as flawed as tenure seems poised to be chipped away at ⁴⁹ as university administrators seek to consolidate their power.

Scientific discoveries, such as the effects of human-caused climate change, are one way in which society critiques its own actions and allows it to make necessary changes. However, governments frequently disregard and do not act on such ominous reports such as the oft ignored warnings of the International Panel of Climate Change regarding CO2 emissions; and scientists are inherently limited in their ability to make sustained pushes for governments to heed this advice. Despite the counsel of scientists, resistance to climate change is frequently co-opted, ignored, or aggressively silenced. This revisionism is not exclusive to the 21st century or high-tech laboratories. Imperialism has for some time attempted to rewrite and ignore histories involving the scientific achievements of groups such as indigenous peoples whose contributions to living in better relation to nature have often gone unnoticed and repressed⁵⁰, to our collective loss.  This control of the scientific narrative is not for a lack of individual scientists pouring their lives into accurately recording and informing others of scientific development, but a lack of organized power, specifically a unionized workforce, among scientific workers.

Any aspect of organizing scientists along a revolutionary path must work towards dispelling the idea that science is apolitical as well as having scientific workers work towards using their skills in a way that no longer benefits the status quo, but rather embodies a revolutionary mindset. One crucial way that this can be attained is through the mass unionization of scientific workforces (a handy “how to form a union” guide: United Auto Workers, n.d.). It would behoove us to acknowledge here that unions in the USA have a complicated past, one that deals with the same racism and sexism that permeates all of modern society (see, The Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai). These serious shortcomings demand a reckoning in today’s organizing spaces, but the power of a union to allow workers to form closer ties and solidarity with others for their collective benefit, and the ability to collectively bargain with our employers in the legal framework of the USA is still a useful framework. A union is a conduit through which we can all stand up for one another that has no replacement in the worker/boss paradigm. 

All of this is to say, despite the spectacle of science’s productivity cult and the widely held belief that science is apolitical (and thereby, above “other” laborers and the messy nature of politics), scientific workers are distinctly exploited workers whose own lives and broad field of labor would benefit from a more democratic method of operation. While scientists can sometimes become CEOs or safely tenured professors, and thus benefit from capitalism’s machinations, the labor of most scientists is stolen and thus scientists should work to change this. Additionally, the work scientists do ripples through to the political world, and through that all of us.

Any revolution worth supporting should have a vision of a better future; it must struggle against falling into reaction and be an encouraging light that can rally people to its cause with a positive vision of the future. Scientific workers, trained with the tool sets of empiricism, collaborating towards novel discoveries, and figuring out where knowledge is and where it is not,  have a set of skills that are invaluable in the process of imagining and creating a better future. This is not to imply that scientists sit in some special category, privileged in their access to knowledge and disconnected from the average layman. Rather, their learned skills have the potential to assist the process of revolution in tangible ways. Revolutions are, at their core, experiments. They are continuous and ever-changing attempts to make a more just and equitable world and ever improve upon it. There will be data sets, there will be laborious analysis, there will be discussions and plans and myriad other requirements of labor needed in order to test new ideas in a revolutionary spirit. Scientists can be of help in this process.

The modern labor movement, while flawed, still represents the structure of how workers of all backgrounds can make a stand for their own rights that is both legally recognized and represents an actual, tangible, threat to those in power. From the broader labor movement’s many strikes this fall being referred to as “striketober”⁵¹ and representing a landmark moment in 21st-century labor relation in the United States, to graduate student employees in and faculty across the United States, from places like Columbia University to the various Universities of California⁵² and faculty at University of Pittsburgh⁵³ forming unions and wielding their collective power both to improve their own situation and to pressure institutions for other progressive reforms. These reforms could include changing the nature of student’s classes that graduate students teach, to taking a more critical stance of science as together, to making it easier for transgender students to have their correct name be placed on diplomas. This unionization effort must be extended both to the professors as a counterbalance to universities and their liberal administrations, and the technicians and other workers across academia and industry. All workers, including those not often celebrated, must be included in the future discussions of how to change science. While this unionization effort is not the end all, the need for scientists to see themselves as part of a whole that has power and can wield it in revolution, is something that unionization can reveal to people. 

The work we do is critical for modern society to continue functioning. As mentioned earlier in this article, scientific trainees, as well as scientific support staff, perform a significant amount of the experimental labor that goes into the scientific process, frequently without democratic say in it. The current system does not wish for scientific workers to use the power of science to lastingly better society, or scientific worker’s own lives. However, by taking lessons from the labor movements of the past, scientists can work towards this better future. This could begin by taking the forms of walk-outs and strikes, demanding (and not asking) that things we as scientists play a tangible role in developing, such as vaccines, be distributed in equitable ways, and withholding our labor if our demands are not answered. And while this would be a first key step, the future down this path holds many promising possibilities, from applying pressure to pass the PRO (Protect the Right to Organize) Act⁵⁴ which would make it easier for unions to organize and have protections against reprisal, to organizing with other, non-union resistance groups that are fighting back against injustices and standing in solidarity with them. From renters’ unions, to environmental activist groups, we must join in a broader struggle against the capitalist ruling class.

And after unionizing your workplace and scientific establishment, what then? Here we have a suggestion to make. Unionization, if it is allowed to end there, with better wages and more secure healthcare only for this solitary group of workers, cannot be enough. If a union stops only at securing its own well-being, then that is a type of right-wing, self-interested ideology that deserves no praise. A union must reach out and stand with groups of other types of labor in order to truly live up to its revolutionary potential. So we would task scientific workers to do the same: Graduate student unions to organize their faculty, faculty unions to organize the technicians in their labs, and so on. 

Additionally, unions should continue to struggle against their employer, even when not actively in the bargaining stage. To this end, we have come up with a project we think could be used broadly in academic institutions across the scientific spectrum. As we have discussed above, funding for scientific endeavors often comes from origins outside public scrutiny. Often we suspect this is intentional, to avoid bringing to light who or what institutions are funding the research. One ability a union has, even in their current hamstrung position in the United States is to request information from its employer. We propose a request for all information pertaining to grants, and funding sources that the institution engages with. While there is still significant work to be done in writing such a request, we believe what it could reveal would be unpleasant truths about where the money comes from. Such information could be seized upon as an opportunity to further inflame sentiments among scientific workers for greater accountability and more democratic control over the institution they work for, perhaps furthering their own drive to become involved in a union. Such an opportunity could also easily be replicated across other institutions, potentially resulting in a strengthening wave of outrage, one that could be put to use organizing scientists.

The way forward

Science is ultimately one type of social mechanism by which we produce knowledge. It is shaped by the society in which it exists. In our case, this is a massively unjust capitalist society, and therefore science exists to generate profit. Within science, academia presents itself as being an apolitical ivory tower devoted to the common good, but this is a charade. Industry is even more upfront in its pursuit of capital accumulation to the detriment of all else. Reforming the scientific establishment is not an easy process: it will need to be comprehensive, not merely undertaken by scientists but by all members of society. It will extend into politics, social justice, economics, and beyond. Thus, our piece has to be considered in the scope of how society views and connects with science as a whole, and how this view can be changed to allow science to flourish for the benefit of all humanity.

With that said, a key first step for scientists will be to agitate and organize around the power of their labor. This is necessary to end both their own exploitation by the scientific establishment and the system’s cooperation with other systems of exploitation. We as scientists should take responsibility for our institutions and fields of study, and ensure that they exist for the benefit of all, not the few. Then, organized science should reach our hands out and find others in the fight against injustice who we can support with this newfound power. In summary – organize, organize, organize, and agitate amongst your peers. Do not go gentle into that good night of liberal individualism that threatens us all, but rage and find a better future of tomorrow, hand in hand with scientific workers the world over.

Suggestions for further action:

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