Tag - justification

Biological Determinism as an Ideological Weapon

The struggle between those who possess social power and those who do not, between "freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed" is a war fought with many and varied weapons. Of highest importance are ideas, weapons in an ideological warfare by...

Recombinant DNA: Does the Fault Lie Within Our Genes?

I have been doing research in bacterial genetics for the last 12 years at Harvard Medical School and I am a member of Science for the People. Over the last couple of years, we have been discussing in our laboratory how the recombinant DNA technique could make certain of our experiments much easier to do. However, as a...

Racism at Harvard

In the middle of May, as students at Harvard Medical School were preparing for their exams, as many medical schools around the country were completing their admissions decisions, as President Ford spoke of "alternatives to busing," Bernard D. Davis, a Professor at Harvard Medical School, stirred up a storm the impact...

Sociobiology: Tool for Social Oppression

Recently, Science for the People groups in Boston and Ann Arbor have formed to analyze and combat this latest appearance of biological determinism. The Boston group prepared a critique which was published in the New York Review of Books (Nov. 13, 1974) and both groups are preparing articles for popular and academic...

Review: Sociobiology — The Skewed Synthesis

In a similar fashion, the theories put forth by the sociobiologists and their predecessors help to support maintenance of the status quo and to convince people that revolutionary changes in social relationships (e.g. class structure and sex roles) are impossible. One way we see this done is by the rapid incorporation...

A History of Eugenics in the Class Struggle

A raft of reports has appeared claiming a genetic basis for intelligence in human beings. These hereditarian explanations for intelligence have been given considerable publicity—by far more than given to opposing views. As a result, whether consciously or not, the U.S. scientific and general public has begun to absorb...

The Inherited Ideology of Science

We have inherited from bourgeois society a science whose structure presupposes that man exists inherently as a passive object of external natural laws that science must discover but over which man has no ultimate control. A revolutionary movement that intends to liberate man's repressed desires will need to overcome...

Motivation or Manipulation: Management Practice and Ideology

There was but a sardonic humor in that appraisal of the work situation. Management's search for a solution to the alienation, boredom, and depersonalization of factory workers directed the course of a symposium entitled "The Corporation and the College as Social Engineers" which was staged at Emmanuel College, a...

Women’s Biology in a Man’s World: Some Issues and Questions

"Yes . . . but women are different" says the well-intentioned liberal, ready to support civil rights and other struggles of women. ..You really can't trust women, they are too emotional, they get hysterical, they're just different ... " says the employer, justifying having women in low-paying, low-status positions...

Psychology in the Legitimation of Apartheid

From an historical point of view, the capitalist mode of production and distribution has led to the emergence of two characteristic types of political system: the liberal democracy exemplified by England and the United States of America on the one hand, and the repressive police state exemplified by Nazi Germany on...