Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Dialectics in Science: An interview with Helena Sheehan

2012-12-30  ·  first published in Climate & Capitalism  ·  221 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “link to climateandcapitalism.com”

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did. The original is still readable at Climate & Capitalism: read it in full (Internet Archive copy).

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Today’s crisis of capitalism has, unsurprisingly, led to a renewed interest in Marxism. Yet any “return to Marx” will not be found in an exegesis of ancient texts but in grounding Marx’s materialist dialectic in the present. Just as Marx critiqued 19th-century advances by incorporating them into his thought, so too must the most promising developments of the last century be synthesized into a radical understanding for the present. Unfortunately, today’s left has for too long has been relegated to social and cultural studies, ceding the “hard” discourse in economics and science to a new generation of vulgar scientistic “quants.” The resulting left has far too often neglected a dialectical critique, in favor of dichotomous relations to science.

The capture this was recovered from