Letter

In Defense of Science and Technology

An Exchange on Eco-Radicals and HIV Denialists

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 843, 4 March 2005.

25 August 2004

To the Editor, Workers Vanguard,

I'd like to take issue with a few of the points in the headline article in the 9 July 2004 issue of your paper [WV No. 829], entitled "We Need a Fighting Workers Party! Break with the Democrats! No Vote to Nader!" First of all, I must say that I completely agree with the sentiment expressed in the title of the article. We certainly do; and we certainly should. One problem I have is that you propose no solutions, on the electoral field. Why not advise your readers to vote for some socialist candidate—perhaps the SWP. Isn't it important that socialism gets at least a few supporters during this sordid upcoming election (if it takes place at all)?

The major problem I have with the article, however, begins with the sentence, "Many of the proposals of the Greens and Nader go against the interests not only of the industrial working class, but against human progress." I would like first to fault the author(s) for not discussing exactly which of the Green's/Nader's proposals are anti-working class, and why and how they are. I think the subject merits special attention, if we are to win over the hearts and minds, especially of working class people now mistakenly supportive of the Greens. The WV has called attention to the fact that, in terms of foreign policy, Nader agrees with Kerry that the U.N. should do the job in Iraq—after ten years of U.N. sanctions already killed millions.

Economically, however, your critique has fallen short. Here is something I wrote recently on the subject. In fact, while they talk a big game about "another world is possible," the Greens have never offered more than ineffectual schemes, such as

� "stakeholder's democracy." Here, corporate stockholders consult with the representatives of communities affected by their decisions—while leaving the present board of directors still in charge,

� "Jeffersonian community based economics." This ecumenical approach to economics assumes that the lamb can lie down with the lion. A vital small business sector can become prevalent, all the while operating in peaceful coexistence with corporations as well as workers cooperatives—provided it is all "decentralized." What happens when the corporations start centralizing again?

� corporate regulation and taxation—asking the government of, for, and by the corporate gangsters, controlled by the corporate gangsters from the Civil War to the present, will now regulate and tax the corporate gangsters in the interest of the public and the environment.

� fanciful small business loan/expanded currency/"democratic investment" programs, by which everyone will somehow gain equal opportunity for prosperity and advancement without challenging the fundamental tendencies toward inequality and misery when the means of production are held in private hands in order to profit from exploiting others' labor.

It is somewhat incredible and disturbing that so many "socialist" groups this year—Solidarity, the International Socialist Organization, the Socialist Alliance and the NY Socialist Project—support voting for the Greens/Nader. They ignore the not-so-trivial fact that such populist schemes have nothing to do with socialism. They may understand the problems with these schemes. They will still argue, however, that a resurgent populist movement will "open the discourse" for further movements toward the left, and "buy us time" to build a genuine opposition. However, as Tim Wohlforth wrote in his book The Struggle for Marxism in the United States, populism has always represented a trap, not a blessing, for the working class socialist movement in the United States. Populism legitimates and props up the order it ostensibly opposes, by accepting its basic principles, by proffering delusions about how this order might be painlessly reformed.

You go on to ask, rhetorically, "And what about the Green Party's �key value,' that people must �live within the ecological and resource limits of our communities' and �move to an energy efficient economy'? What does this mean for the already desperately poor in inner-city ghettos? For the fight against the horrible worldwide AIDS pandemic, which requires sophisticated medicines, refrigeration—i.e., electrification and a modern industrial infrastructure? We need an international expansion of advanced technology, science and production to solve these world problems, not a retreat to some utopian sentimental pre-industrial Hobbiton of happy farmers, honest tradesmen and small craftsmen, which is impossible in any case. Technology and large-scale industry, which is extremely efficient and saves huge amounts of human labor, can be used to solve human problems."

This polemic is positively embarrassing! It is utterly outdated and completely out of touch with current realities. It seems deliberately designed to alienate any ecologically minded person from Marxism, which you seem to confuse, in the ecological field, at least, with Stalinism.

Are you honestly trying to assert that there are no "ecological and resource limits" upon our use of industrial technology? It seems that way, although you never actually state this ridiculous claim. It would indeed be difficult to do so, after the Pentagon itself, in a secret memo leaked recently, has predicted massive unrest all over the world in just a few decades, as a result of global warming, which even the Pentagon admits is occurring as a result of our tremendous over-use of "technology and large-scale industry"!

Where have you been?! Haven't you been reading the forecasts of the Club of Rome, which indicate that we need to lower our worldwide industrial use by 90%? Haven't you looked at the Ecologist recently, or the works of Mike Davis (Ecology of Fear, Dead Cities), James [sic] Bellamy Foster (Marx's Ecology), Joel Kovel (The Enemy of Nature) and Saral Sarkar (Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism?)? All these authors are socialists, attempted either to synthesize Marxism with ecologism (Sarkar, Kovel) or show that Marx was already an ecologist, very much cognizant of "ecological and resource limits" (Foster). Or has the mere fact that such authors and reports remind you Spartacists ever so superficially of Thomas Malthus' work (Foster devotes much of his book to the problems that ecologist Marx himself had with Malthus), dictate that they may safely be placed on the dustbin of "human progress"?!

Instead of seriously disputing or even grappling with these ecologists' assertions, you simply and crudely assert that we need to "fight against the horrible worldwide AIDS pandemic!" This is silly "emergency-ism": No time for serious thought right now about our opponents' claims: the sky is falling! As if the mere mention of "AIDS!" should lead us all to forget completely that the world is heading toward ecological disaster! Here again, however, you reveal yourself to be remarkably out of touch with the current debate. There is much debate about whether AIDS is all it has been cracked up to be: or whether, in fact, HIV even exists! See Dr. Peter Duesberg's massive tome on the subject, Inventing the AIDS Virus. According to Duesberg and other dissenters, AIDS may instead be the product of the overuse of drugs as well as a code word for old fashioned diseases no one would spend any money on otherwise—like malaria, dysentery, and starvation—in the Third World.

Whether or not HIV actually exists, there is also considerable contention about whether the so-called "anti-AIDS cocktails," these "sophisticated medicines" whose "refrigeration" requires the destruction of the planet, in your addled view, actually stop AIDS, or rather, in fact, weaken and kill the patients! Many of them were, after all, at one time drugs offered by the pharmaceutical industry for chemotherapy. At that time, they were judged too dangerous, even for chemotherapy. So along comes the "AIDS crisis," and, lo and behold, and what do you know—suddenly they become cure-alls for AIDS, and are judged benign! Now, isn't that spec-ial?

There are alternative means of treating the conditions called AIDS—they are holistic, however. They involve supporting and boosting our immune systems rather than destroying our bodies. They do not require expensive, toxic drugs, nor massive "refrigeration" nor "electrification"—impossible in a few centuries anyway, according to ecosocialists like Sarkar, since we are running out of fossil fuels, nuclear is too dangerous, and "solar electricity" simply will not work.

Finally, I wish to critique your satire of the "pre-industrial Hobbiton" of the Greens' vision, their "community economics" utopia. Yes, it is a bit silly and unrefined. There is the assumption that some of us can be merchants, others artisans, others farmers, etc. and still all miraculously get along and treat each other like in that REM song, "smiling happy people holding hands" (a leading "Community Economics" theorist, Steve Welzer, former SWP'er, even argues that feudalism was OK and a damn sight better than capitalism!). It's too petit-bourgeois for my tastes, too. But that should not dissuade us from understanding that Marx and Engels themselves put forward a socialist version of decentralism. Theirs was not a vision of a "MetroMarxist" future, in which we all would and should live in big cities, in the modern "Megalopolei." Foster is very clear on this point, in Marx's Ecology: as is Engels himself, in The Housing Question, as is Marx and Engels, in such works as The Communist Manifesto. Look at it; there it is; right under your very noses, Spartacists! The "decentralization of population; the unity of industry and agriculture": what do you think that means, right there in the Manifesto?! It doesn't mean a "pre-industrial Hobbiton." It does mean that the working class, once in power, builds garden cities, with their own industry, in the countryside, and greens existing cities, a la the visionary plans of Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, Henry Wright, and Lewis Mumford, and the contemporary "new urbanists." Each worker will work and farm/garden, collectively. Industry must be made ecologically safe: non-polluting, as much as possible. As against the deadly stultification of our suburbs and dying small towns, the fruits of cosmopolitan urban culture and society will be spread throughout the land.

Instead of sticking your heads in the anti-ecological Stalinist sands, why not think about what these supremely ecological demands from Marx and Engels mean for us today? How about, as part of our transitional program, the demand to "turn prison towns into garden cities for current prisoners, slum dwellers and workers!"?

Tom S. Brooklyn, NY

WV replies:

Tom S. claims that we did not back up our statement that many positions of the Greens and Ralph Nader are reactionary and anti-working-class. But, in the very next sentence, the WV article stated: "In Germany, the Social Democratic/Green government attacked the living standards of the workers to increase Germany's competitiveness, while Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer deployed German jets, tanks and troops, for the first time since the Third Reich, to participate in the wars against Serbia and Afghanistan." The article went on to note that Nader panders to the racists in his attacks on immigrants and wallows in anti-Communist China-bashing.

Citing WV's criticism of the Greens' aversion to advanced technology, Tom S. asks, "Are you honestly trying to assert that there are no �ecological and resource limits' upon our use of industrial technology?" His reference to "our" use of technology implicitly identifies humanity as a whole with the capitalist class, which in the current world system directs the development and utilization of industrial technology for its own interests. What ecological and resources limits exist to the future expansion of material production, and the concrete nature of such limits, cannot be accurately judged within the framework of the capitalist system.

To look at the capitalists' unbounded squandering of natural resources and degradation of the environment in the interests of profit, one could easily conclude—as most ecologists do—that advanced industrial technology is inherently destructive of nature. This reflects a static, ahistorical view of both human society and scientific progress. Developing and using industrial technology to deal with pollution or the recycling of raw materials in limited supply is not necessarily an insurmountable problem.

Science and technology are not the same thing. Science is based on a process of experimentation and the gathering of empirical knowledge in the service of deepening our understanding of how nature works; technology is the application and fulfillment of what science makes known. But technological considerations do not exist apart from class society. The organization of industrial production under capitalism necessarily leads to the degradation of the environment because capitalist firms are motivated solely by maximizing profits.

The basic goal of Marxist socialism is to liberate the creative powers of humanity, which have been shackled by the capitalist system and earlier forms of class-divided society. Marxists regard the development of the productivity of human labor power as the prime mover of social evolution and the underpinning of historical progress. We look to a qualitative increase in the application of known science and the development of new technology. Ultimately this will liberate the productive capacities of mankind, eliminating economic scarcity—while laying the basis for the disappearance of classes and for the withering away of the state. Such a qualitative development of the world's productive forces for the benefit of all can hardly be envisaged under capitalism, whose every step forward is paid for with giant steps back in the form of world poverty, recurring economic crises and wars. It can only be achieved in the context of an internationally planned, socialist economy.

The qualitative superiority of a collectivized, planned economy over capitalist anarchy was demonstrated in practice by the historical experience of the Soviet Union. To deny the historic gains of the Russian Revolution, social democrats (and anarchists) point to the Stalinist bureaucracy, which—we Marxists understand—grew out of the isolation of the Russian Revolution in a single, economically backward country. Even given the tremendous bureaucratic distortions due to the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, the USSR was able to construct an advanced industrial economy almost from the ground up. And the Soviets did it twice, first in overcoming the ravages of the 1918-20 Civil War and then, again, a scant generation later, in recovering from the Nazi invaders' scorched-earth policies and the loss of 27 million lives in World War II. The precondition for that historic gain for working people was the 1917 Russian Revolution, which took the factories and other means of production out of the hands of the capitalist class.

The Russian Revolution demonstrated in practice the ability of the proletariat to seize the reins of state power and construct a modern industrial society in which workers have access to medicine, science, education and culture. It is this question, workers revolution, that at bottom separates us from the ecologists. As Marxists, we oppose the environmentalist movement not because we are indifferent to the degradation of the environment caused by the existing capitalist organization of industry. As Marx wrote in Capital Vol. 3 (1894):

"Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias [good heads of the household], they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition."

What we oppose is the ecologists' illusion that this question can be adequately addressed without the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system.

Marxism and the Environment

John Bellamy Foster, one of the authors recommended by Tom S., goes to great pains in Marx's Ecology (2000) to depict Marxism as "deeply, and indeed systematically, ecological," while simultaneously trying to airbrush out the revolutionary underpinnings of Marx and Engels' worldview. Foster quotes (and repeatedly refers to) Engels' projection in Anti-D�hring (1878) that:

"Abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not merely possible. It has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself, just as it has become a necessity of agricultural production and, besides, of public health. The present poisoning of the air, water and land can be put an end to only by the fusion of town and country; and only such fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of disease."

Yet Marx and Engels' view of socialist society is fundamentally counterposed to the universe of small, decentralized communities advocated by ecologists (and anarchists). Saral Sarkar, another of the authors touted by Tom S., writes that "in eco-socialism, to a large extent, economic activities would be decentralised, economic units small, and regions and local communities self-provisioning and autonomous" (Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? [1999]). This harks back to the pre-industrial village, essentially glorifying the "mental torpidity" of rural life decried by Marx and Engels. It is also profoundly inegalitarian: Would you rather live in a self-provisioning commune in the fertile U.S. Midwest or in devastated Haiti?

Marxists understand that the qualitatively higher level of industrial productivity of socialist society compared to capitalism will lay the basis for overcoming the division between manual and intellectual labor, agricultural and industrial labor. As Engels put it, "productive labour, instead of being a means of subjugating men, will become a means of their emancipation, by offering each individual the opportunity to develop all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions and exercise them to the full—in which, therefore, productive labour will become a pleasure instead of being a burden."

The precondition is the revolutionary seizure of state power by the proletariat. Immediately preceding the above passage from Anti-D�hring, quoted by Foster, Engels states that "only the abolition of the capitalist character of modern industry" and the creation of society in which the productive forces are organized "on the basis of one single vast plan can allow industry to be distributed over the whole country in the way best adapted to its own development."

In contrast, "eco-socialist" Sarkar dismisses "all illusions as to the revolutionary or leading role of the proletariat" because workers are "addicted to consumerism." He advocates a reversion to pre-industrial, "labour-intensive technologies" which "would be preferred, not only to provide jobs, but also because such technologies reduce resource consumption and, consequently, have less negative environmental impact." This is a reactionary utopia in which the mass of humanity would work longer and harder while consuming less. Sarkar himself describes it as "similar to an ever-worsening recession" and "a great crisis without end."

Most Green activists do not subscribe to Sarkar's uncompromising primitivism, preferring to focus on eco-reformism within the framework of the existing capitalist order. The policies they advocate to "protect" the environment and "conserve" energy usually would result in lowering the living standards of the working class and poor. Tom S. cites the Club of Rome, a think tank founded by a Fiat executive, whose 1972 best seller, The Limits to Growth, claimed that limited oil and other natural resources imposed a ceiling on economic expansion. That thesis dovetailed neatly with the austerity plans pushed by bourgeois politicians, who argued that working people were living beyond their means by consuming cheap but irreplaceable energy. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter called for "painful" sacrifices as he asserted: "Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems—wasteful use of resources."

In a two-part series, "Eco-Radicalism and Bourgeois Politics" (WV No. 695 and 696, 28 August and 11 September 1998), we wrote:

"In their denigration of the proletariat and their promotion of schemes to �save the environment' under the existing capitalist system, the eco-radicals help perpetuate this system in which science and technology are often used in ways destructive to humanity. The vast nuclear arsenal in the hands of U.S. imperialism poses a far greater danger to humanity than does leakage from nuclear power plants. Under capitalist rule, the fundamental irrationality of profit and market relations can render unsafe even the best understood technology. But in opposition to eco-radicals, we are defenders of technological development and promoters of it. Even the present technology is more than adequate to provide food and shelter for everyone. Yet, as famine plagues many countries, the U.S. government is still paying farmers here not to grow food."

The revolutionary Marxist solution to the problem of degradation of the environment has as its necessary precondition proletarian socialist revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries of North America, West Europe and Japan. In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, we wrote an article on the world oil market, which concluded:

"The ecology activists are right in one important respect: the massive burning of hydrocarbons—whether oil or coal—is in the long term bad for the earth's atmosphere. The answer, however, is not to save oil by cutting the living standards of North American and European working people. A planned socialist economy would carry out the scientific research required to develop safer, more efficient sources of energy (including nuclear and solar energy)."

— "The World Oil Racket," WV No. 535, 27 September 1991

Communism and Human Liberation

At bottom, eco-radicalism is bourgeois ideology. It shares the same basic premise as other expressions of bourgeois ideology: that the capitalist system has developed the highest level of scientific knowledge and technical application possible in the present period and in the foreseeable future. Sarkar's book contains a lengthy section implying that even under socialism solar power would not be a viable technology for generating electricity. Why not? He cites a 1978 study purporting to prove that, given the existing technology, the total energy indirectly consumed in manufacturing a solar power plant is greater than what the plant would produce during its lifetime. (There are a number of studies contradicting that conclusion; Sarkar dismisses a few out of hand while simply ignoring the rest.) Yet even if Sarkar's contention were justified with regard to current solar energy technology, its generalization to socialist society is invalid. It assumes that it is impossible to significantly increase the efficiency of solar cells or lower their production costs—hardly the most intractable technical problem facing mankind.

A socialist system is, by its very nature, not limited to the known technologies developed and utilized by the capitalist mode of production. Under a socialized system of international planning, an international workers soviet would no doubt choose to invest considerable resources in developing renewable energy sources and in reorienting the world economy away from a reliance on fossil fuels. In contrast, investment decisions under capitalism, including those regarding research and development, are primarily determined by how individual capitalist companies feel they can make a profit. If burning fossil fuels results in pollution, environmental degradation and disease, that is not a concern to the individual capitalist; those costs don't appear on his balance sheet.

Moreover, the development of communism will be accompanied by a corollary downward drift in the present population hypertrophy. Evidence of this can already be seen under capitalism in the industrially advanced countries of the world—e.g., Japan, North America and Western Europe—where economic and technological advancement has effected, not through fiat, a substantial reduction in the birthrate. Under communism, both the division between town and country and economic dependence on the family will virtually disappear. No longer will poor peasants or agricultural workers be compelled to have more children in order to ensure enough manpower to work the land. Human beings will have far greater mastery over both their natural and social environments.

Additionally, communist society will be based on a thoroughly different set of social values from those that exist today. The liberation of women from patriarchal domination will mean complete and unhindered access to birth control and contraception. Communism will elevate the standard of life for everyone to the highest possible level. By eliminating scarcity, poverty and want, communism will also eliminate the greatest driving force for the prevalence of religion and superstition—and the attendant backwardness, which defines the role of women as the producers of the next generation of working masses to be exploited. A prolonged, mild population shrinkage based on increasing material abundance and progressive social ideals will go a long way toward ensuring that there are enough resources to guarantee the well-being of all.

Tom S. misidentifies our views on modern industrial technology with those of J.V. Stalin. Environmentalists commonly point to the former Soviet Union to argue that socialist planning is just as destructive of the environment as capitalism. However, the ecological disasters which occurred in the USSR, as well as those being created in China today, resulted from the mismanagement of the collectivized economy by the Stalinist bureaucracy. A Soviet government based on workers democracy, representing the interests of the working people, would have sought to prevent the pollution of the Caspian Sea and the destruction of the Aral Sea, as it would resist the mounting pollution today of China's rivers and urban atmosphere.

But we approach such questions from the standpoint of strengthening, developing and extending the planned, collectivized economy and technological progress. The capitalist counterrevolution which destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991-92 has certainly "improved" the environment, and some Green radicals may welcome the closing of Russia's steel smelters and other factories, since they no longer poison the atmosphere. But the final reversal of the remaining gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution, above all the destruction of the Soviet planned economy, was a historic defeat for the proletariat that has brought with it an enormous rise in the death rate due to rampant malnutrition and disease.

The Reactionary Agenda of HIV-Denialists

Over the past couple of decades, accelerated in good part by "death of communism" reaction in the imperialist centers following capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union in 1991-92, there has been a growing assault on science, from the teaching of evolution in public schools to stem-cell research. A manifestation of this trend is the crusade, which Tom S. champions, promoting the lie that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS. This is not a scientific debate. It is a reactionary campaign which aims to provide pseudo-scientific legitimacy for a right-wing social agenda that would condemn millions of people to death.

The scientific godfather for this crusade is Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley, who claims that HIV is harmless and that AIDS is caused by "life-style" factors such as illicit drug use by gay men and others, as well as by AZT, a drug used to combat HIV. His book, Inventing the AIDS Virus, was published by Regnery Publishing, a right-wing outfit that also publishes such reactionary, anti-gay bigots as Patrick Buchanan, G. Gordon Liddy and Ann Coulter. Duesberg served as an adviser to South African president Thabo Mbeki, whose ignorant diatribes denying that HIV causes AIDS were largely aimed at deflecting criticism over his government's criminal refusal to allocate medical resources to combat the epidemic. Despite overwhelming evidence that a course of anti-retroviral medication for HIV-positive pregnant women can largely prevent transmission of the virus to the fetus, the Mbeki government fought for years to block distribution of these medicines; today it does little to implement even those limited government programs that were finally set up.

The fact that the main victims of AIDS, when it was first recognized in 1981, were homosexual men and, later, intravenous drug users, brought to the fore a powerful undercurrent of anti-gay bigotry and racism in the response to the disease. Randy Shilts, in his book And The Band Played On, documented how difficult it was for doctors trying to deal with the beginnings of the epidemic to get any recognition or response from U.S. government health officials. Right-wing religious bigots and reactionary politicians seized on the idea that AIDS is a "behavioral" rather than an infectious disease to present it as God's punishment for people they would just as soon see dead. Suicidally, a number of gay activists and even some leftists have bought into this myth.

That HIV causes AIDS is a scientific fact, no less than Darwinian evolution. The mechanisms by which the virus breaks down the immune system are the subject of considerable research and debate. But that HIV causes AIDS is not a matter of scientific dispute. An article by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) titled "The Evidence That HIV Causes AIDS," posted on their Web site, notes: "AIDS and HIV infection are invariably linked in time, place and population group." And: "Many studies agree that only a single factor, HIV, predicts whether a person will develop AIDS." Another NIH article, "How HIV Causes AIDS," declares that "the level of HIV in an untreated individual's plasma 6 months to a year after infection...is highly predictive of the rate of disease progression; that is, patients with high levels of virus are much more likely to get sicker, faster, than those with low levels of virus."

Given the racism inherent in American capitalism, and especially the legacy of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments where black men were criminally allowed to go untreated for decades by researchers who wanted to study the effects of the disease, many black people are justifiably suspicious of the government and the medical establishment. Tragically, many blacks buy into conspiracy theories, promoted by the likes of nationalist demagogue Louis Farrakhan, claiming that AIDS is a government conspiracy to kill blacks. Obviously, anyone believing this myth—or the myth that HIV does not cause AIDS—would be less likely to use condoms, get tested for HIV infection or seek medical treatment.

Tom S. tells us that there are "holistic" treatments for AIDS that do not require "expensive, toxic drugs." Obviously, anyone who believes this would see no need to demand the vast increase in funding that is needed across the board for health care and medical research on AIDS. Why denounce those like the U.S. and South African governments, who refuse to make vital medications readily available, or the pharmaceutical giants, which demand exorbitant prices for life-prolonging medicines? At bottom, the myth about combating AIDS through "alternative" or "holistic" remedies boils down to an argument against fighting the pharmaceutical giants, the racist governments and the whole capitalist system.

In a recent study, touted on Web sites devoted to "holistic" therapies as well as in the New York Times, the onset of AIDS was delayed in HIV-infected pregnant women in Tanzania when they were given vitamin supplements—hardly a surprising result in a country beset by widespread malnutrition. An author of the study hailed this as "a low-cost intervention that could result in major savings." Not widely reported was the study's conclusion that the "benefits" of vitamins were "small relative to the effects of triple antiretroviral therapy" ("A Randomized Trial of Multivitamin Supplements and HIV Disease Progression and Mortality," The New England Journal of Medicine, 1 July 2004). This study exemplifies the racism inherent in capitalism/imperialism, not least in how it provides—or fails to provide—health care. As in numerous other AIDS studies carried out in Africa, the doctors watched as scores of black women grew sick and died of AIDS without administering anti-retroviral drugs known to be effective in prolonging their lives—and 267 of the women were given a placebo, that is, no treatment at all. As in the Tuskegee experiment, the rationale given for such studies is that these impoverished black women would not have had access to advanced medications in any case.

The bourgeoisie's racist disdain for the lives of its colonial underlings partakes of a mindset that sees everything from human life to the natural environment as nothing but raw materials to be ravaged in the drive for profit. That the leaders of the most powerful industrial country in the world have minds filled with the worst superstitions, ignorance and bigotry of the Dark Ages is dramatic evidence of the decay of capitalist society. That backwardness and irrationality is mirrored in petty-bourgeois fads like faith healing, astrology and hostility to science and technology. Socialist revolution will make modern technique, science, culture and education available to all, with a corresponding explosion in creative human energy. As Friedrich Engels wrote in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880):

"Man's own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom."