Today we face dire and escalating crises, not least of which is the looming climate threat. Following the French critic Gilles Dauvé, we can say the prospect of climate catastrophe poses not just a social crisis but a civilizational one.

The peril of the climate crisis has been enhanced by the denial of climate science by the political right. Many were alarmed by talk of “alternative facts” by the first Trump administration, which signaled a careless disregard for truth. Climate action, already under threat by right-wing science denial, would surely be further devastated under such an irrationalist regime.

These fears have continued to be confirmed. Since returning to office, Trump has attacked institutions of science and knowledge directly. He has repeatedly threatened Harvard and other universities, and has made serious cuts to federal science funding.

Any attempt to offer a “critique of science” may seem absurd in the face of this right-wing offensive. The late sociologist Bruno Latour reoriented his earlier criticisms of science and its ideology for this reason. Latour worried that excessive academic focus on critiquing the ideology of science missed the more important task of defending science against attacks from the right in a kind of popular front.

Yet, it is my argument that the question of science, its ideology, and its politics should remain an issue  for Marxists. There are real problems with professional science as it is practiced in capitalist society. Marxists should take these problems seriously even as we worry about the advance of the far-right.

The prevailing (and often unspoken) bourgeois conception of science is of free-standing independent research enterprises, not unlike the bourgeois ideal of the anarchy of a market of small firms. In reality, as with the economy, science is produced within a social totality and cannot be divorced from historical, social, and political dimensions of society.

While we should recognize that science is socially embedded, we also cannot simply reject science out of hand as a corrupt product of bourgeois power. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno offer us a way to understand the connection between relations of production and the forms of knowledge which derive from and reinforce those relations, while retaining a broader view of what science and rationality can be.

Long before Latour, Horkheimer theorized science as first and foremost a social practice. Horkheimer wrote this in an essay titled “Traditional and Critical Theory,” which was first published in the 30’s. In the years following its publication, the expansion of scientific institutions through World War II and the Cold War confirmed his emphasis on the real economic, institutional, and political embeddedness of the practice of science. Much of what we think of as institutional science in the United States today (now increasingly under threat from the current government) was produced through the war effort.

Science, since the Enlightenment, has been a practical means by which the world can be made predictable. This enables humanity to better dominate our environments. The development of this world-dominating rationality was closely related to the expansion of humanity’s productive capacity.

The relationship between science and economy echoes down to the ideological foundations of scientific practice. Science in capitalist society builds upwards from empirical data toward ever-more general laws. Experimental results are meant to be reproducible and exact.

Adorno calls this model of science “positivism.”

Such a method is at odds with a dialectical view of a world in motion. Adorno argues that the passion for predictability makes us incapable of understanding new developments which do not fit the models we have developed to explain away the world. Unless we can critically interrogate our received models and methods, we risk losing touch with a world which is always changing.

The issues of the positivist philosophy of science are particularly stark when they are adopted by social scientists. Building up from empirical observation to stable and reproducible explanations of social phenomena erases the dynamism that defines contradiction-ridden class history. As the world changes, so too must the concepts used to describe it – otherwise, concepts risk losing their contact with reality.

Instead, bourgeois social science tends toward the prediction of more of the same. In doing so, it reproduces the ideological myths that make capitalist society appear natural, rather than a historical form possible to overcome.

For Horkheimer and Adorno, Marxism cannot simply reproduce the forms of bourgeois social science. Marxism must be a critique of knowledge production as much as it is the production of new knowledge. Critical knowledge production must exceed the formal, methodological, and disciplinary boundaries that characterize science as it is tied to capitalist production and reproduction. Thus, the production of knowledge cannot be severed from the project of transforming society. Knowledge must be linked to the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.

One tradition seeking to realize movement knowledge is that of worker’s inquiry, especially as developed by the Italian Workerists in the postwar years.

Workers’ inquiry seeks to critically develop Marxist concepts by investigating the current conditions of specific workplaces. As a method, it means actively involving workers themselves in the production of knowledge and the orientation of knowledge production toward serving the workers’ movement. The collective Notes From Below recently published a reflection on a practical attempt at relating workers’ inquiry to feminist co-research principles.

The relationship between worker’s inquiry and critical sociology should be developed further, and I hope to develop theoretical and practical work in this domain going forward.

Cameron Day is a sociologist researching culture, institutions of social control, and social theory. He has studied the translation from media moral panics to crime-control legislation and rhetorics of science in the nonprofit sector. He is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago and is currently studying alternative approaches to criminal justice and psychiatric institutionalization. He is also a member of the Critical Theory Working Group editorial collective. For more on this subject, please see: Cameron Day, “Beyond Postpositivism: Dialectics, Epistemology, and Critical Sociology with Adorno and Horkheimer” in Sociological Theory, 2025.

Image: Will Lee via Flicker (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)