Science, Scientists and the Press

 First of all, the Press is out to sell a story. They want eyes and they are driven by internal political world views. The Press is not some benign organization of truth seekers. It a group of ego driven characters who want to get as much personal benefit as possible.

Second, scientists and in this I would include physicians, do not understand the press, but the younger generation feel they can push their own world views along with their view of what science says.

Third, science is ever changing. What is accepted today may be rejected tomorrow. History is filled with examples.

Now Science has a piece bemoaning the attack on these poor scientists when they expose themselves via the press. They note:

When Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus University Medical Center, visited a museum in Amsterdam with her family last year, she was spotted by the wrong crowd: people who hate Koopmans because of her work on COVID-19. “They started really yelling, banging,” she says. “Security locked the doors.” Since early in the pandemic, Koopmans has found herself targeted by people who believe the pandemic is a hoax, the virus was created intentionally to cause harm, or vaccines are dangerous. She has received death threats, been accused of belonging to an elite network of pedophiles—a belief held by devotees of the QAnon conspiracy theory—and told she should be tried for crimes against humanity. Now, Koopmans no longer makes public appearances without first alerting the police. As a frequent guest on Dutch TV, “I cannot go out on the street anonymously,” she says. Her family is not comfortable walking outside with her, and they worry about her ever traveling to the United States, where much of the vitriol originates.

 These scientists fail to understand the common person, the one who lost their job, have been quarantined and lack food or human companionship. The scientists pontificates from their safe sinecure while the press positions and promotes their world view. The naive scientists has no idea what their pompous words will do to the masses. The become characters out of "The Big Bang Theory", oblivious to the human race. 

Perhaps the best solution is to stick with their science and avoid the press.

Marx and MIT

 MIT Grad Students are to vote on unionizing. In the old days, yes when I was there, it was a highly competitive environment, kind of like the Marine Corps for techys. Now, under the current administration, it has become the Venezuela of Technical Schools, managed by a collective of administrators and influencers who want to tell everyone what they should be doing. Not the MIT I knew.

My father and brother were in the IBEW, electricians. In New York City even. You see, IBEW members in NYC make small fortunes, based on the union contracts. In addition in unions everyone is equal, unless you are more equal as a union leader. Kind of like Animal Farm.

As a Grad student, you should feel lucky that your tuition is paid for and you get some added experience. I did. Otherwise I would most likely never have finished. The competitive atmosphere of MIT back in the 60s made for the competitive bent of the entrepreneur. Unions despise compensation based on individual performance. They demand uniformity and compliance with the rules of the union bosses. It is the antithesis of a scientific and engineering environment.

Harvard managed to unionize, hopefully MIT does not see it that way. BUT, and this is critical, the management of the place has seeded the grad students with those compliant with such environment. The current management has trained the students perforce of the multiplicity of overpaid and unneeded Deans etc to indoctrinate students and moreover the make certain that no creative and competitive individual is allowed.

One surmises that the establishment of a union is just the next step in this ever forward vision of Marxist compliance. You see, Marx stipulates that individuals do not exist, or more strongly must not exist, but groups do. The proletariat is a class, a class that must conflict with the ruling class, but done so as a group, a class. Thus unions mandate that people belong to this class. It is, in my opinion, in an institution like MIT a truly Marxist step.

As an afterthought, unions make everyone equal, one is part of the grand proletariat. If so, and say someone wins a Nobel Prize, do all get to share in the prize since by definition we are no longer individuals but we are a single mass of people.

The Polish (Ukraine) Question

 In Rosa Luxemburg's writing she addresses the Polish Question as follows (see Rosa Luxemburg, The Polish Question)

 Progress is evident in every regard, and many aspects of the working-class struggle look quite different from the way they did thirty-two years ago. But the essential element in this entire development lies in the following: from a sect of ideologues, socialists have grown into a major unified party capable of handling its own affairs. Then, they barely existed in isolated little groups outside the mainstream of political life in every country; today, they represent the dominant factor in the life of society.

 This is particularly true in the major civilized countries; but in every country they are an element to be taken seriously and to be reckoned with at every step by government and ruling class alike. Then, it was a question of merely spreading the new message; today, the paramount question is how the struggle of the vast popular masses, now thoroughly imbued with the gospel of socialism, can best be led toward its goal.

 The International Workers' Congress has undergone corresponding changes. In its beginning, the International was more of a council that met to formulate the basic principles of the new movement; today, it is primarily, even exclusively, a body for practical deliberations by the conscious proletariat on the urgent questions of its day to day struggle.

 All tasks and objectives are here subjected to rigorous evaluation as to their practicability; those, however, that appear to exceed the forces of the proletariat are laid aside, regardless of how attractive or appealing they may sound. This is the essential difference between the conference this year in St. Martin's Hall and the one that took place thirty-two years ago, and it is from this perspective that the resolution laid before the Congress must be examined.

 The resolution on the restoration of Poland to be presented at the London Congress reads as follows.

 "Whereas, the subjugation of one nation by another can serve only the interests of capitalists and despots, while for working people in both oppressed and oppressor nation it is equally pernicious; and whereas, in particular, the Russian tsardom, which owes its internal strength and its external significance to the subjugation and partition of Poland, constitutes a permanent threat to the development of the international workers' movement, the Congress hereby resolves: that the independence of Poland represents an imperative political demand both for the Polish proletariat and for the international labor movement as a whole."

 The demand for the political independence of Poland is supported by two arguments: first, the general perniciousness of annexations from the point of view of the interests of the proletariat; and second, the special significance of the subjugation of Poland for the continued existence of the Russian tsardom, and thus, by implication, the significance of Polish independence for its downfall. Let us take the second point first. The Russian tsardom derives neither its inner strength nor its external significance from the subjugation of Poland. This assertion in the resolution is false from A to Z.

 The Russian tsardom derives its inner strength from the social relations within Russia itself. The historical basis of Russian absolutism is a natural economy resting on the archaic communal- property relations of the peasantry.

 The remains of this backward social structure-and there are many such remains still to be found in Russia today-along with the total configuration of other social factors, constitute the basis of the Russian tsardom. The nobility is kept under the tsar's thumb by an endless flow of handouts paid for by taxing the peasantry. Foreign policy is conducted to benefit the bourgeoisie with the opening of new markets as its main objective, while customs policy puts the Russian consumer at the mercy of the manufacturers. Finally, even the domestic activity of the tsardom is in the service of capital: the organization of industrial expositions, the construction of the Siberian railroad, and other projects of a similar nature are all carried out with a view to advancing the interests of capitalism. In general, under the tsardom the bourgeoisie plays an inordinately important role in shaping domestic and foreign policy, a role which its numerical inconsequence would never permit it to play without the tsar. This, then, is the combination of factors which gives the tsardom its strength internally.

 So it continues to vegetate, because the obsolete social forms have not yet completely disappeared, and the embryonic class relations of a modern society have not yet fully developed and crystallized. Again: the strength of the tsardom abroad derives not from the partition of Poland, but from the particular features of the Russian Empire. Its vast human masses provide an unlimited source of financial and military resources, available almost on command, which elevates Russia to the level of a first-rate European power. Its vastness and geographic position give Russia a very special interest in the Eastern question, in which it vies with the other nations that are also involved in that part of the world.

 At the same time, Russia borders on the British possessions in Asia, which is leading it toward an inevitable confrontation with England. In Europe, too, Russia is deeply involved in the most vital concerns of the European powers. Especially in the nineteenth century, the revolutionary class struggles just now emerging have put the tsardom in the role of guardian of reaction in Europe, which fact also contributes to its stature abroad.

 But above all, in speaking of Russia's foreign position, especially over the last few decades, it is not the partition of Poland but solely and exclusively the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine that lends it its power: by dividing Europe into two hostile camps, by creating a permanent threat of war, and by driving France further and further into the arms of Russia. From false premises come false conclusions: as if the existence of an independent Poland could deprive Russia of its powers at home or abroad.

 The restoration of Poland could bring about the downfall of Russian absolutism only if it simultaneously abolished the social basis of the tsardom within Russia itself, i.e., the remains of the old peasant economy and the importance of the tsardom for both the nobility and the bourgeoisie. But of course this is arrant nonsense: it makes no difference-with or without Poland these relations remain unchanged.

 The hope of breaking the hold of Russian omnipotence through the restoration of Poland is an anachronism stemming from that bygone time when there seemed to be no hope that forces within Russia itself would ever be capable of  achieving the destruction of the tsardom. The Russia of that time, a land of natural economy, seemed, as did all such countries, to be mired in total social stagnation. But since the sixties it has set a course toward the development of a modern economy and in so doing has sown the seeds for a solution to the problem of Russian absolutism.

 The tsardom finds itself forced to support a capitalist economy, but in so doing it is sawing off the limb on which it sits. Through its financial policies it is destroying whatever remains of the old agricultural-communal relationships, and is thus eliminating any basis for conservative modes of thought among the peasantry. What is more, in its plundering of the peasantry, the tsardom is undermining its own material foundations and destroying the resources with which it purchased the loyalty of the nobility.

 Finally, the tsardom has apparently made it its special task to ruin the major class of consumers at the bourgeoisie's expense, thus leaving with its pockets empty the very class to whose pecuniary interests it sacrificed the interests of the nation as a whole. Once a useful agent of the bourgeois economy, the ponderous bureaucracy has become its fetters. The result is the accelerated growth of the industrial proletariat, the one social force with which the tsardom cannot ally itself and to which it cannot give ground without jeopardizing its own existence. These, then, are the social contradictions whose solution involves the downfall of absolutism. The tsardom is driving forward to that fatal moment like a rolling stone on a steep hill. The hill is the development of capitalism, and at its foot the iron fists of the working class are waiting.  

Replace Poland with Ukraine and the Tsar with Putin and we get an interesting parallel.  History has a way or repeating itself again and again. It is a shame that so few people remember it or are even the slightest bit aware.

Stalin and Ukraine

 We continue with Stalin's view of nations and specifically Ukraine where Stalin writes:

The Concept of "Nation" Reply to Comrades Meshkov, Kovalchuk, and Others, March 18, 1929, Stalin, Joseph. Selected Works: Volume 1 (p. 787). Prism Key Press. Kindle Edition.

 The Russian Marxists have long had their theory of the nation. According to this theory, a nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of the common possession of four principal characteristics, namely: a common language, a common territory, a common economic life, and a common psychological make-up manifested in common specific features of national culture. This theory, as we know, has received general recognition in our Party. It is evident from your letters that you consider this theory inadequate. You therefore propose that the four characteristics of a nation be supplemented by a fifth, namely, that a nation possesses its own, separate national state. You consider that there is not and cannot be a nation unless this fifth characteristic is present. I think that the scheme you propose, with its new, fifth characteristic of the concept "nation," is profoundly mistaken and cannot be justified either theoretically or in practice, politically.

 According to your scheme, only such nations are to be recognised as nations as have their own state, separate from others, whereas all oppressed nations which have no independent statehood would have to be deleted from the category of nations; moreover, the struggle of oppressed nations against national oppression and the struggle of colonial peoples against imperialism would have to be excluded from the concept "national movement" and "national-liberation movement."

 More than that. According to your scheme we would have to assert:

 a) that the Irish became a nation only after the formation of the "Irish Free State," and that before that they did not constitute a nation;

 b) that the Norwegians were not a nation before Norway's secession from Sweden, and became a nation only after that secession;

 c) that the Ukrainians were not a nation when the Ukraine formed part of tsarist Russia; that they became a nation only after they seceded from Soviet Russia under the Central Rada and Hetman Skoropadsky, but again ceased to be a nation after they united their Ukrainian Soviet Republic with the other Soviet Republics to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

 A great many such examples could be cited. Obviously, a scheme which leads to such absurd conclusions cannot be regarded as a scientific scheme. In practice, politically, your scheme inevitably leads to the justification of national, imperialist oppression, whose exponents emphatically refuse to recognise as real nations oppressed and unequal nations which have no separate national state of their own, and consider that this circumstance gives them the right to oppress these nations.

 That is apart from the fact that your scheme provides a justification for the bourgeois nationalists in our Soviet Republics who argue that the Soviet nations ceased to be nations when they agreed to unite their national Soviet Republics into a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

 That is how matters stand with regard to "supplementing" and "amending" the Russian Marxist theory of the nation. Only one thing remains, and that is to admit that the Russian Marxist theory of the nation is the only correct theory.

Ukraine was and remained an independent nation albeit aligned with the Soviet in Russia. It is clear that even for the butcher Stalin Ukraine was both a nation and independent. The loss of nationhood for Ukraine was a result of the Tsar, which in this case becomes Putin.

Stalin on Nations

 It is worth reading what Stalin wrote on nations at this time. Most people view Stalin as just a murdering thug. However he wrote extensively and these writings were often put to action. Thus on Nations:

Stalin, Writings, Vol 1, Prism Key Press, 2013

 I. The Nation

 What is a nation?

 A nation is primarily a community, a definite community of people.

 This community is not racial, nor is it tribal. The modern Italian nation was formed from Romans, Teutons, Etruscans, Greeks, Arabs, and so forth. The French nation was formed from Gauls, Romans, Britons, Teutons, and so on. The same must be said of the British, the Germans and others, who were formed into nations from people of diverse races and tribes.

 Thus, a nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people.

 On the other hand, it is unquestionable that the great empires of Cyrus and Alexander could not be called nations, although they came to be constituted historically and were formed out of different tribes and races. They were not nations, but casual and loosely-connected conglomerations of groups, which fell apart or joined together according to the victories or defeats of this or that conqueror.

 Thus, a nation is not a casual or ephemeral conglomeration, but a stable community of people. But not every stable community constitutes a nation. Austria and Russia are also stable communities, but nobody calls them nations. What distinguishes a national community from a state community? The fact, among others, that a national community is inconceivable without a common language, while a state need not have a common language.

 The Czech nation in Austria and the Polish in Russia would be impossible if each did not have a common language, whereas the integrity of Russia and Austria is not affected by the fact that there are a number of different languages within their borders. We are referring, of course, to the spoken languages of the people and not to the official governmental languages.

 Thus, a common language is one of the characteristic features of a nation.

 This, of course, does not mean that different nations always and everywhere speak different languages, or that all who speak one language necessarily constitute one nation. A common language for every nation, but not necessarily different languages for different nations! There is no nation which at one and the same time speaks several languages, but this does not mean that there cannot be two nations speaking the same language! Englishmen and Americans speak one language, but they do not constitute one nation. The same is true of the Norwegians and the Danes, the English and the Irish.

 But why, for instance, do the English and the Americans not constitute one nation in spite of their common language?

 Firstly, because they do not live together, but inhabit different territories. A nation is formed only as a result of lengthy and systematic intercourse, as a result of people living together generation after generation. But people cannot live together, for lengthy periods unless they have a common territory. Englishmen and Americans originally inhabited the same territory, England, and constituted one nation. Later, one section of the English emigrated from England to a new territory, America, and there, in the new territory, in the course of time, came to form the new American nation. Difference of. territory led to the formation of different nations.

 Thus, a common territory is one of the characteristic features of a nation. But this is not all. Common territory does not by itself create a nation. This requires, in addition, an internal economic bond to weld the various parts of the nation into a single whole. There is no such bond between England and America, and so they constitute two different nations. But the Americans themselves would not deserve to be called a nation were not the different parts of America bound together into an economic whole, as a result of division of labour between them, the development of means of communication, and so forth.

 Take the Georgians, for instance. The Georgians before the Reform inhabited a common territory and spoke one language. Nevertheless, they did not, strictly speaking, constitute one nation, for, being split up into a number of disconnected principalities, they could not share a common economic life; for centuries they waged war against each other and pillaged each other, each inciting the Persians and Turks against the other. The ephemeral and casual union of the principalities which some successful king sometimes managed to bring about embraced at best a superficial administrative sphere, and rapidly disintegrated owing to the caprices of the princes and the indifference of the peasants. Nor could it be otherwise in economically disunited Georgia.

 Georgia came on the scene as a nation only in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the fall of serfdom and the growth of the economic life of the country, the development of means of communication and the rise of capitalism, introduced division of labour between the various districts of Georgia, completely shattered the economic isolation of the principalities and bound them together into a single whole.

 The same must be said of the other nations which have passed through the stage of feudalism and have developed capitalism.

 Thus, a common economic life, economic cohesion, is one of the characteristic features of a nation.

 But even this is not all.

 Apart from the foregoing, one must take into consideration the specific spiritual complexion of the people constituting a nation. Nations differ not only in their conditions of life, but also in spiritual complexion, which manifests itself in peculiarities of national culture. If England, America and Ireland, which speak one language, nevertheless constitute three distinct nations, it is in no small measure due to the peculiar psychological make-up which they developed from generation to generation as a result of dissimilar conditions of existence. Of course, by itself, psychological make-up or, as it is otherwise called, "national character," is something intangible for the observer, but in so far as it manifests itself in a distinctive culture common to the nation it is something tangible and cannot be ignored.

 Needless to say, "national character" is not a thing that is fixed once and for all, but is modified by changes in the conditions of life; but since it exists at every given moment, it leaves its impress on the physiognomy of the nation.

 Stalin assembled what was the Soviet Union but in so doing supported nationalism as an identity element. It was Rosa Luxemburg who opposed Stalin's view and sought to eliminate nations to create a pan communist state. 

One then must ask, is Putin a Stalinist or Luxemburgite?