A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

synthetic yarns, new materials, agricultural products and machinery,
health and medicinal products, medical imaging, nuclear power, space
travel, and finally, computers and information and computing technologies
made the 20 th century so very different from all other centuries before.
The Second World War was a great stimulus for many of these
technological innovations, as it was for warships, submarines, better
guns, missiles, more destructive ammunition, and finally the ultimate
weapon of mass destruction, the atomic bomb. The century was not remarkable
only for the range and uniqueness of the industrial products
that science and technology produced, it was equally breathtaking for
the theoretical insights into the workings of nature that science was able
to uncover. Beginning with Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations, structure
of matter that Rutherford revealed by experiments with atoms,
quantum mechanics, theory of relativity, Einstein’s energy-mass equation,
the understanding of the source of Sun’s energy, astrophysics, cosmology
and the structure of the Universe, semiconductors (the basis for
making computer chips), molecular biology, genes and genomes; the
list can go on. The mysterious nature that so overwhelmed the primitive
human lay bare in its invisible functioning’s so that humans could control
it with unfailing preciseness to reap benefits and improve its lot.
For these ‘old left’ scientists of Europe in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, even when many of these products or laws of nature
were not completely known, approval for science and its boundless frontiers
was never a question for debate. In 1954, J.D. Bernal wrote in ‘Science
in History’:
‘The transformation of nature, along the lines indicated by the biological
sciences, will be undertaken with the use of heavy machinery, including
possibly atomic energy. All the river basins of the world can be brought
under control, providing ample power, abolishing floods, droughts, and
destructive soil erosion, and widely extending the areas of cultivation
and stock raising…. Beyond this lie possibilities of further extending the
productive zone of the world to cover present desert and mountain
wastes and making full use of the resources of the seas, and beyond
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