Science as a Direct Productive Force

(Methodological Studies)

V. N. Rotshtein

1

The transformation of science into a direct productive force of society is the most important hallmark of our epoch. This circumstance is increasingly drawing attention to science from the side from which it itself becomes the subject of scientific research.

Anyone who closely follows the flow of science-of-science literature in recent years cannot fail to see the extraordinary specificity of this young branch of knowledge—namely, that the problems posed by science studies, by virtue of their novelty and distinctiveness, can be solved only through the joint efforts of scholars of different specialties. In this sense a special task falls to philosophy: it is called upon to develop the general methodological principles of concrete science-of-science research.

The aim of the present work is to illuminate the methodological aspect of a comprehensive study of science as a direct productive force.

The idea of the transformation of science into a direct productive force, first expressed by K. Marx, has until now been disputed by a number of authors, including Marxists; it is challenged, in particular, on the following formal grounds: science, it is said, cannot be (or become) a direct productive force because it is a form of social consciousness. This proposition, rejected by contemporary practice, is, however, not only of historical interest. The point is that the theoretical premises of this assertion are still shared and defended by many authors and therefore may be regarded as one of the modern points of view.

And this point of view, it must be said, is untenable. First, the definition of science contained in it solely as a form of social consciousness must be recognized as one-sided, ignoring other features of science. Second, the representatives of the above-mentioned point of view draw their concrete conclusion (“science cannot be a direct productive force”) directly from the opposition of general philosophical categories (“being” and “consciousness,” “practice” and “theory”), filled with the same metaphysically absolutized and abstract content. The fruitlessness of such logical operations—which, incidentally, have “rich” traditions—is now simply obvious: they are capable of creating only the appearance of valid conclusions.

The ever more active participation of science in the construction of the material and technical base of communism has removed the question of the impossibility of the transformation of science into a direct productive force and has even, as often happens in science when an obsolete and untenable conception is replaced by a new, opposite theoretical extreme, given rise to it. Stating the actual transformation of science under socialism into a direct productive force, some researchers explain this by saying that science itself, supposedly, either does not turn into one of the varieties of practice transforming material reality at all. To the question of how this is accomplished, researchers do not give a distinct answer—perhaps because such an answer is impossible.

It is interesting that, as proof that their position is correct, the authors of the above-mentioned point of view refer to the same thought of K. Marx to which the defenders of the opposite assertion also refer, according to which science cannot become a direct productive force.

But let us quote Marx’s own thought: “The degree of development of fixed capital is an indicator of the extent to which general social knowledge—science—has become an immediate productive force, and hence of the extent to which the conditions of the social life-process itself have been brought under the control of the general intellect and transformed in accordance with its requirements. Of the extent to which the production of the social productive forces has been accomplished not only in the form of knowledge, but in the form of immediate organs of social practice; in the form of the real process of life.”¹

Is it not obvious that, first, Marx associated the process by which science becomes an immediate productive force already with highly developed capitalism, dating the beginning of this process to the nineteenth century; and that, second, by this process Marx understood long-standing, historically definite forms of the connection between theory and practice.

It is also obvious that both the denial and the recognition of the possibility that science may become an immediate productive force—each of these conclusions is inseparably linked with a definite understanding of what science is “in itself.” Therefore the latter question deserves special consideration.

3

Through the joint efforts of scholars, three features of science have been identified as fundamental; accordingly, these have become the three principal aspects of its investigation. In this sense science is considered, first, as a form of social consciousness, as a system of knowledge about the world; second, as a special type of the social division of labor, as scientific activity connected with a whole system of relations among scholars and scientific institutions; and, third, from the standpoint of the practical application of its conclusions, that is, from the standpoint of its social role.

Different understandings of the essence of each of these properties of science and, most importantly, different understandings of their interrelation determine the multiplicity of conceptions among Marxist scholars, which in general may be reduced to three principal ways of interpreting the given problem.²

The first approach—namely, understanding science only as a form of social consciousness—was mentioned by us above.

According to the second approach, science is considered as a unity in three listed properties. The weakness of this way of considering the matter consists, in our view, in the fact that it does not go beyond stating this unity, and therefore does not solve the chief task: to disclose the actual interaction of the elements of science, i.e., to determine the place and specific function of each of them within this unity as such.

It is precisely for this reason that we adhere to the third point of view, whose authors, while not denying the unity in science of its three elements, single out within this unity the principal element—the theoretical side of science, its informational function. “In every process, phenomenon, there is its chief aspect, without which the existence of the others is unthinkable; in science such an aspect is the theoretical one. Just as moral or religious relations and actions are impossible without the corresponding moral and religious conceptions, so the activity of scientific institutions and the application of the results of their labor are impossible without the existence and development of scientific theory. This theory... always mediates the corresponding actions and relations of people”³.

Under contemporary conditions, when this type of social division of labor, such as science, engages millions of people, when one of the most pressing socio-economic tasks becomes that of organizing and planning the scientific process—in short, under the conditions of the transformation of science into a directly productive force—the most important methodological problem of finding the “measure” of science naturally arises. And what is quite symptomatic in this connection is that an ever larger number of researchers are coming to the conclusion that the general foundation, the algorithm for solving scientometric problems, must be science taken as an informational system, i.e., science in its theoretical aspect. “The end of measurements in the history of science is still far from completion. One may suggest that combinations of quantities susceptible to measurement (their products, separate ratios, etc.) will prove especially promising for precise science studies. At the same time it is necessary to devote close attention to the development of indicators possessing the greatest generality for different branches of sci-

science. In the search for comparable (over time and for different branches of science) characteristics of their historical development, we regard as promising the approach to research activity as a distinctive process. From this general informational point of view, science may be considered as a complex, dynamically developing information system created by human beings for the collection, analysis, and processing of information with the aim of obtaining new truths and new practical applications.”*)

But, having singled out the informational function of science as its main aspect, we have thereby faced the need to answer the question of the concrete content of this function.

4

First of all, the very definition of the informational function of science requires clarification. According to the initial proposition of cybernetics, the concept of “information” acquires real meaning only through its relation to the concept of “control,” because ontologically, i.e., as phenomena, information and control exist in inseparable connection with one another. This should be understood as follows. Every self-governing system (including the human being and human society) organizes its relations with the external environment (and only in external relations does it exist) by bringing itself into conformity with the features of the external environment. And such conformity is achieved as a definite result of an informational process. The dialectic here is this: the active side of the existence of a self-governing system gives rise to the necessity of a definite degree of awareness concerning the features of the external environment, so that this information may guide the corresponding activity of the system.

In what, then, does the informational-control function of science consist?

Material-production activity—according to Marx, “the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human life”**)—not only called science into being, but also predetermined many future features of it. The ascertainment of this historical fact characterizes science above all from the point of view of its closest ties with the active side of social life, i.e., from the point of view of its practical use.

*) G. M. Dobrov, The Science of Science. Kiev: “Naukova Dumka,” 1966, pp. 24–25.
**) K. Marx, Capital, vol. I. Gospolitizdat, 1955, p. 191.

But here, too, lies the possibility of a theoretical error—the absolutization of this obvious feature of science. Poincaré did not avoid such an error either. “Science,” he wrote, “is a rule of action that leads to success in general only on condition that a rule with the opposite content has no success.”⁴

In the cited quotation there is almost a complete identification of science and practice (“action”); and to the extent that Poincaré nevertheless distinguishes science from practice, he interprets the latter in the spirit of Machist irrationalism, i.e., in a complete break with the theory of reflection.

For us, however, it is more instructive not only to examine Poincaré’s delusion, but also the “mechanism” of this delusion; it is as follows. Poincaré derives the entire distinctive character of science from one exclusively human need, interpreted by him in the same subjective-idealistic way. Therefore, in his conception the guiding function of science is clearly “swollen,” while the informational function is treated agnostically. In connection with this we should like to set forth here one methodological consideration. Of course, science is called upon to serve social practice with information (to guide activity); this circumstance, naturally, affects the character of the information “supplied” by science, and so on. And yet “human” (more precisely, material-production, social) activity creates only the possibility of science. The actual scientific process begins at the point of intersection of lines drawn from two determinants. One of these determinants is precisely social-production practice; the other is material reality external with respect to society.

But to say that objective reality is the source of all forms of social consciousness, including science, is to say something too general, too little, and therefore also incorrect. In our philosophical literature there still prevails a point of view whose authors, proceeding precisely from this premise, arrive at the conclusion that the forms of social consciousness differ from one another precisely as different “modes of generalization,” “methods of attaining truth”⁶, etc. It is therefore impossible not to support the effort of the Bulgarian philosopher T. Pavlov “...to prove that the definition of method only as a path

to truth, first, by the absence of passion; second, by the absence of materialism; and third, by the absence of dialectics”⁹). In fact, why does the “path to truth,” when it is quite sufficient to have a single shortest path, not stop before the seemingly inevitable conclusion from this point of view: having acknowledged philosophy (and in general any logical cognition) as the best “method of attaining truth,” he predicted the imminent demise of another form of social consciousness—art. And if contemporary representatives of this point of view do not draw such a conclusion, this is explained only by the fact that they are insufficiently consistent in their reasoning.

And here is a representative of another point of view, Spencer, who said regarding the fact that “there still exists, although somewhat vaguely, yet very widespread, the opinion that scientific knowledge is by its very nature distinct from ordinary, everyday knowledge”¹⁰, whereas science is the same ordinary consciousness—only “in a perfected and expanded form”¹¹. Criticizing the point of view of Spencer, Taylor, and others, A. Spirkin writes that, according to them, “the consciousness of modern man differs from primitive consciousness only in the quantity of mental material. The representatives of this trend constructed anti-historical schemes of a ‘savage-philosopher.’ It is easy to see that, with such a formulation of the question, the crudest methodological error is committed. Consciousness cannot develop in the direction of the quantitative enrichment of knowledge without at the same time changing qualitatively”¹².

One cannot but agree with such criticism, but this “cannot” sounds too “imperative,” and here is why. In A. Spirkin’s critical assessment of Spencer’s gnoseological point of view there is no indication of the metaphysical character of his ontological conception, which in the corresponding way predestined all the other aspects of Spencer’s philosophy. A qualitative change in knowledge is impossible because, according to Spencer, above all, reality itself—the source of all knowledge (and the latter is recognized by Spencer)—is homogeneous, non-contradictory; in it everything is one and the same: essence and phenomenon, internal and external, etc.; if some differences nevertheless exist, these differences are purely gradual. Yet, in particular, it was precisely with the many-quality character and contradictoriness of the objective world that

⁹ Cf. Problems of Aesthetics, Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1958, p. 17.
¹⁰ H. Spencer, The Origin of Science. St. Petersburg, 1898, p. 1.
¹¹ Ibid., p. 9.
¹² A. Spirkin, The Origin of Consciousness. Gospolitizdat, Moscow, 1960, p. 4.

Marx’s existence of science as a specific form of social consciousness. “If the form of manifestation and the essence of things directly coincided,” Marx wrote, “then all science would be superfluous”^13).

And here we approach a very important methodological principle that is debated in our philosophical literature. While unanimously accepting the thesis that the material world is the single object of all forms of social consciousness, by no means all materialist scholars, however, share the following proposition: the object, common to all forms of social consciousness and all types of thought, is infinitely complex in its structure and multifaceted, and only by “turning” toward each separate form of social consciousness and each separate type of thought with certain of its aspects and properties does it become, in these relations, the specific subject of the corresponding forms of social consciousness and types of thought.^14)

In turn, this specific subject of each form of social consciousness, being transformed—in the process of cognition of it—into the content of thought, becomes, in a chief way through the content of thought, the factor determining the specificity of the forms of social consciousness.

Thus, the definition of the second determinant of science (the objective world) itself requires a certain concretization. The subject of science is not the entire objective world but only certain of its aspects. “The concept (cognition),” wrote V. I. Lenin, “in being (in immediate phenomena) reveals essence (law, cause, identity, difference, etc.)—such is actually the general course of all human cognition (of all science) in general. Such is the course of natural science, and of political economy (and history).”^15)

Only after carrying out all these preliminary investigations of the two determinants of science can one disclose the content of the actual, scientific process. Possessing the “dignity of immediate reality,” social practice is directed toward the transformation of material reality. Pre-

^13) K. Marx, Capital, vol. III, Gospolitizdat, 1950, p. 830.
^14) In this sense philosophy is not an exception either: contrary to the assertions of some researchers, philosophy is not a science of the world as a whole—it studies only its universal properties; thus, all its other properties remain outside the limits of its subject.
^15) V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 29, p. 298.

formations as material objects are possible only in accordance with their own nature, i.e., in accordance with the laws that govern objects; in laws “invariance is reflected in the connection of objects, which finds its expression in the fact that this connection is repeated under various spatio-temporal conditions”⁷. In turn, the invariance of laws, like the structure of objects, conditions the determination of the investigation of laws by the immediate reality of objects. Such law-governed character of objects, their involvement in a substantially general—not attained by practice, namely by virtue of the immediate reality of the latter—bringing of social practice into correspondence with objective laws is carried out by science precisely because, abstracting from the individual peculiarities (the immediate reality) of objects, science creates its own laws, idealized objects; and these idealized objects of science model only those properties of material objects that characterize precisely the involvement of material objects in a certain essential generality, in some law.

Such is the dialectic of the information-controlling function of science, which determines all its other features, including the transformation of science into a direct productive force.

5

To see the development of things is the best way to explain them. We recognize in advance that our historical sketch of science will necessarily be fragmentary.

At the sources of the human society’s practice stood the need for transforming nature, the repeatability of elementary labor processes. The task of managing such activity was fully answered by ordinary consciousness, which did not rise above visual systematizations and generalizations.

The progress of production led, in particular, to the separation of mental labor from physical labor, which was explained, in a certain sense, by the fact that the growing complexity and specialization of labor processes (and consequently the broader and deeper transformations of nature) required a higher level of correspondence to

changing human activity with those properties of nature toward which this activity was directed and in which some incompatibility with the immediate reality of these objects was revealed. This circumstance was not understood by Spencer: he conceived the conditions for satisfying the evolved needs of social practice as the simple increase of the object of labor or the change of its content, and therefore extrapolated ordinary consciousness, in the “translation” of its meaning, onto the whole future history of humanity. The real problem, however, consisted in the fact that progressing practice needed not only an increase in the object of information, but, above all, a new quality of it. Under these conditions science also arose as a special activity, as a special kind of social division of labor, whose task was (and remains) to supply social practice with information about the intrinsic properties of the objective world, which constitute the essence of the immediate reality of objects but which, to a certain degree, do not coincide with the latter. On this basis there arose the unity of productive—practice and theory—production and science. In this sense all subsequent development of production and science was only a dialectical change in the form of such a unity.

The development of the interconnections of production and science has taken place, and continues to take place, not along a straight, uninterrupted line; it has known both signs of deviation and “divergences” of opposites, and moments of stagnation, and cases of movement backward. But for all these complexities, on the scale of all history it can nevertheless be represented as a progressive movement, as a definite tendency. Progressing production, the ever more radical and extensive transformation of natural objects, required not only a simple increase in the volume of scientific information, but also the theoretical mastery of the deepest world secrets. In other words, production more and more needed science, and the further it went, the broader, more essential, and more systematic this need became. On the other hand, this meant that science increasingly stimulated and regulated social practice: production not only increasingly determined and expanded the direction of theoretical searches, but also developed the material base without which the movement of scientific progress, beginning at a certain level, would have been simply impossible⁸.

The indicated tendency finally reaches the contemporary—historically highest—level, at which humanity’s transformative activity is carried out (and only in this way can be carried out) in direct, multifaceted, and constant contacts with science. And the fact that, under these conditions, science, owing to the immense growth of its informational capacities, proves capable of directing such activity and of turning it into the immediate productive force of society—this same fact has a decisive influence on all the other aspects of so complex a social phenomenon as science.

Discussions of the place of science in the system of modern productive forces testify to the fact that the problem named has many aspects. We set ourselves the goal of illuminating in the proposed work only one—the methodological—aspect of the problem. To the extent that we have succeeded in doing so, we shall consider our task accomplished.

1. From the unpublished manuscripts of K. Marx, Bolshevik, no. 11–12, 1939, p. 63. ↩

2. It should be noted that almost all works on the science of science share the traditional tendency of their authors to give short and capacious definitions of science—the desire, in a single complex-subordinate (and sometimes in a simple extended) sentence, to say everything about science. Without denying the attractiveness of such attempts, we cannot, at the same time, refrain from expressing doubt as to their successful realization: very broad content has to be placed in too “tight” a logical form. ↩

3. N. A. Rachkov, Science and Social Progress. Publishing House of Moscow University, 1963, p. 8. ↩

4. A. Poincaré, The Value of Science. Moscow, 1906, p. 153. ↩

5. The “aesthetic essence” of science, as Poincaré understood it, and other elements of his conception only concretize Poincaré’s attempts to extrapolate the specificity of science once again from the “immanent” properties of the human being himself. ↩

6. A similar view is expressed, for example, by V. Razumnyi. See his: Problems of Aesthetics. Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1958, p. 73. ↩

7. D. P. Gorskii. Problems of the General Methodology of Science and Dialectical Logic. Moscow: Mysl, 1966, p. 196. ↩

8. One of the regularities of the development of science is the expansion and deepening of its connections with the natural-scientific disciplines; in this sense, the experimental and technical base of the modern sciences becomes our own social material production. ↩