Anti-Science: Progressive and Reactionary
17 Oct 2026
Anti-science sentiment, notable especially within the “anti-vax” movement, has two sides, corresponding with the dialectical struggle between the bourgeois and proletarian classes.
One side comes from the bourgeoisie, and is to be struggled against entirely. They are not the biggest bourgeois, whom “science” serves, and who start the engines on most all “scientific” endeavors in society. The biggest bourgeois who lord over production would have us think that we are on an escalator of progress, and that all is developing to the benefit of humanity. They support — financially as well as politically — more-or-less “status-quo” “science,” as well as its institutions, working always to incorporate any “new” developments into their production, defanging them of anything that goes against their interest and generally succeeding at doing so.
No, the bourgeois who oppose “science” in this fashion are of a smaller type, less powerful, more industrial-minded, and more tied to the domestic market over international markets. They are more-or-less in constant revolt with their bourgeois betters, the big capitalist-imperialists, who squeeze them through the power of finance and supply. It is in this context — the context of dialectical inter-class opposition, an opposition within the class that is, at the same time, and as an entire paradigm, opposed to the class of the proletariat — that this section of bourgeois oppose the current order of society, a society that supports the big imperial capitalists. Their opposition necessarily includes also the superstructure of this society, “science” included, attempting to replace it with the only thing available to them: the defeated and feudalistic ideas of the past, though, of course, dressed with a “modern” flair, no matter the time period. The critique of science by these lesser bourgeois is reactionary, replacing materialism with idealism and attempting to turn back the tides of history, de-throne “secularism” and all scientific development, crowning religious and degenerated “family” (clan) sentiments in its place.
But anti-science sentiment is found also on the opposite side of the class contradiction, where it takes on different character among the proletarians. Here, coming from the revolutionary class, it has progressive character, even while it is tainted with bourgeois influence due to the lack of proletarian power in society, prevalent especially now in our time of low class consciousness. The “anti-science” of the proletarians is not due to reactionary individualism like the bourgeois, even while this sentiment does exist parasitically within the proletarian class, especially in its more privileged members. On the whole, and serving as the real material basis of the workers’ critique of “science” however, is the real material oppression the workers receive due to science as it currently exists in class society, that is, as it exists in service to the capitalists who oppress them.
For the consumer, which all workers are necessarily and as a rule relegated to, science is interacted with most directly in the form of medical commodities, in the form of doctor’s visits, procedures, medicines, and the like. The bourgeoisie, those in possession of money and capital, may engage with the market of medical commodities in more or less “freedom,” that is, they are free to purchase their commodities from virtually the whole fabric of suppliers, even leaving the country to find the best specialists. But the workers, especially in our country, have no such freedom. If they have healthcare at all, it is tied to an increasingly restrictive private insurance plan, set up by the employer. These plans dictate which medical commodities the worker is allowed to receive benefits towards, effectively restricting doctors and medications to what is approved by bourgeois insurance salespeople, and putting workers face to face, as individuals, against the full productive forces of the capitalist’s profit-making medical industries where they are corralled and treated in accordance with bourgeois profit schemes, often left confused, disoriented, and abandoned to deal with any adverse side-effects from treatment all on their own without proper professional follow-up. The sentiment that the medical industry often fails the people is well-known.
More than simply the medical industry however, it is a fact of production that any advancements in science and technology benefit the owners over and against the workers. As new technology comes in, increased worker competition and lower wages come with it. Employees are laid off and remaining employees made to cover the slack, often without additional compensation. Advancements in production like self-checkout and online ordering, which offer some convenience or advantage to the consumer, aggravate the employment or wages of workers, if not deny them entirely. While “breakthrough” technological advancements or the newest electronic gadgets hang above the workers’ heads, broadcasted into the consumer market as a whole, workers as a whole are less and less able to purchase even the basic commodities needed for their existence, not to mention the latest and greatest in expensive tech or treatments. As “science” shoots off satellites and celebrities into space, constantly preaching “progress,” the proletariat watch firmly planted to the earth, chained to wage labor and private property, liable always to have their existence reduced to destitution.
The reasonable distrust that the workers have for technology, the medical industry, and the tradition of “science” that informs them, is revolutionary and progressive, even while it necessarily slides headlong into idealism and the defeated “natural sciences” of pre-capitalist societies, with workers often adopting spirituality and “alternative medicines” in their opposition to the established order. These phantoms are the only available channels for their alienation in the face of “science,” and these channels act against them, reinforcing the capitalist system, creating markets of “alternative science” and deluding the people away from rational thought and materialism, both of which instruct in the necessity of class revolution in the final view. It is because true science, science that is materialist and dialectical, the science of the new society that struggles to be born, and that does not muddy its truths with idealism and profit, stands always on the side of Communism, that we Communists must reject and instruct through the idealist delusions of the people, and especially the working class. All of life and all true scientific perspectives support the underlying principles of Marxism-Leninism. If we instruct the people to adopt a scientific mindset, that is, one that is materialist, and we educate through their delusions with the light of class science, we will be building also Marxist-Leninists and revolutionaries in utero.
To invalidate the distrust of scientific “authority” within the working masses is to invalidate their oppression, but to fail to invalidate the unscientific delusions of the workers is to hand them over to their oppressors.