A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

that again lie the possibilities of microbiological and photochemical production
of food’.
For Bernal, science made anything possible. Similar uncritical approval
of science, days after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came
from the French physicist and Communist Party member, Fredric Joliot-
Curie when he argued
“I am personally convinced that, despite the feelings aroused by the application
of atomic energy to destructive ends, it will be of inestimable
service to mankind in peacetime”.
As ought to be evident, such promises of science even if harnessed to
socialism would appear incongruous today as we witness the threats to
the Earth and a vast majority of humanity living on it, some sixty years
since.
Even though the Soviet Union experiment went on for 70 years, and was
replicated in some form or the other in countries like China, Cuba, Vietnam,
erstwhile socialist countries of Eastern Europe, East Germany and
so on, it would be hard to argue that the promise of the agency of science
acting for the common good of the humanity has anywhere been realized.
That is partly also because the manner of integrating science to socialism
as was done in the Soviet Union in the initial years was gradually given
up, and after it collapsed, except perhaps for Cuba, all other socialist countries,
with China topping the list, made science subservient to the market
in a new political thesis it calls market-socialism. If anything, many might
argue that the conditions have in fact worsened.
That ought not to be seen as a condemnation of either science or of socialism.
One could argue that the problem stems mostly from the complete
neglect in factoring in the ecological dimension, inherent not only
in capitalism but in the socialist practice too.
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