The Progressive Nature of Soviet Science – An Appreciation
By Adrian Chan-Wyles PhD
‘The [bourgeois] education system was therefore the institution that was always given the task of overcoming the following contradiction: how can the theoretical consciousness of ever-expanding groups be heightened without calling into question the supremacy of bourgeois ideology, which is based upon ignorance and intellectual repression?’
Alain Badiou: The Communist Hypothesis (2010) – Page 73
Alain Badiou: The Communist Hypothesis (2010) – Page 73
I have appropriated the above photograph from the cover of the 1986 British academic book entitled ‘The Communist Party and Soviet Science’ authored by Stephen Fortescue of the University of Birmingham. This book was one of many anti-Soviet and pro-Western Cold War titles that appeared in the ‘Studies in Soviet History & Society’ series edited by RW Davies, and which were designed to thoroughly misrepresent apriori the Soviet Union, its politics, its ideology, its culture, its history and its numerous and progressive scientific achievements. This approach became fairly standard in the West (with the exception of the excellent work of the British journalist of Russian descent – Alexander Werth) following the US and Western European instigation of the Cold War which painted the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as a regime of homicidal maniacs, and its ideology of Marxist-Leninism as being both totalitarian and enslaving. The Western bourgeois (i.e. middle class) governments felt compelled to initiate this policy as a means of preventing their respective working class populations from becoming positively aware of the Marxist ideology of Scientific Socialism and collectively coming together to over-throw or transform their national bourgeois systems into a worker-led international Socialist State. Deliberately lying and fabricating all kinds of nonsense about the Soviet Union became something of a national pastime for Western, bourgeois academia. In fact the approach that was institutionally adopted was that of the ideology of racism whereby an entirely negatively imagined ‘other’ takes the place of the ‘real’ subject under scrutiny. This was nothing other than the contrived policy of bourgeois governments formulating a national anti-Soviet campaign, and then instructing all academic establishments and scholarly communities to put these flawed policies into action as ‘theories’ and falsely indoctrinate generation after generation of students against Scientific Socialism and the Soviet Union. Consequently through this policy of deception very little ‘real’ information about the USSR ever got through this delusional barrier and the working and middle classes in the West continued to remain largely ignorant of the true positive nature of the Soviet system and its remarkable social and scientific achievements. In fact so anesthetized had the average Westerner become to Soviet progressiveness that when Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957, it sent shockwaves around the world. Duped Westerners were asking themselves how a backward and corrupt nation like the USSR could have suddenly moved ahead in the Space Race. This disbelief sounds similar to that of a pious medieval pilgrim whose religious faith is tested when a deeply held (but otherwise ‘mythic’) belief in a deity (or its power) is proven to be non-existent. The Soviet Union as an imagined ugly old hag of Christianity (which was inspired by its persecution of women described as ‘witches’), only existed in the deliberately fabricated and collective hysteria of the West and had absolutely no bearing whatsoever on real Soviet history or achievement.
The bourgeois system is middle class in nature. A minority of people within a society possess the majority of the nation’s wealth and virtually all the political power. The working class – who comprise the majority of the people living in a bourgeois system – perform all the productive labour and create all of the real wealth but due to the inherent and defining inequality of bourgeois society, the worker does not own the means of production, does not own the fruits of his or her labour, and is given only a very small percentage of the immense profit his or her work creates. This mass of workers lead an impoverished life and are more or less excluded from any effective participation in the middle class system or political arena. This is why it is in the best interests of the bourgeoisie to ensure that the workers are kept in this state of physical servitude and mental ignorance. For the Bourgeois, individual freedom is attained on the backs of numerous faceless workers. The workers suffer and strive for no significant reward and no meaningful changes in their circumstances, whilst their managers reap the rewards of immense profit and extended leisure time. This is why the bourgeoisie value ‘individuality’ so highly because it is the freedom they have ‘exploited’ out of the worker. As the bourgeoisie controls the banks, educational establishments, the church and the political system, they are ‘individually’ free to use their immense financial power to literally ‘buy’ any experience of freedom they choose. For the humble worker who lacks any political, social or financial power, the only apparent freedom is that of participating in the very exploitative system that defines existence as a continuous relentless and detrimental struggle. Scientific Socialism firstly explains this detrimental situation to the worker, and in so doing sets off a domino-effect of initiating the mind of the worker into a full and intellectual activation that had previously been denied him or her by the bourgeois system, as by and large the working class is denied any meaningful access to further or higher education. The worker learns exactly what the bourgeois system is and what it represents. More importantly, the worker learns about his or her own plight and develops an understanding about what to do to permanently change things for the better. In short the worker is entirely empowered and is taught that the mind of the bourgeois is anti-scientific because of its inverted ‘religious’ nature that mistakes a ‘thought’ of a deity in the head with the presence of an actual deity existing independently within the physical world. The implication of this insight is startling because it indicates that bourgeois ‘science’ is not free and must always remain within the constraints of bourgeois-defined ideological norms. Bourgeois science is carried-out by a privileged educational elite that have been taught to use their minds in a non-inverted manner whilst pursuing scientific research, but which retain exactly the same bourgeois ‘inverted’ mind in their so-called ‘private’ life. This leads to the bizarre situation where a scientist who routinely makes professional use of a non-religious mind-set, also retains the very same religiously motived (and inverted) mind-set of the Judeo-Christian religion that had kept European thinking in the darkness of superstition, for well over the last one thousand years! This somewhat ‘bipolar’ and thoroughly contradictory vision of reality the bourgeois refers to as ‘choice’, and considers the notion of ‘individuality’ as its preferred mode of transport.
In a bourgeois society that considers itself ‘free’ it is only the middle class that possess the wealth and social connections to enjoy this perceived freedom. The bourgeois enjoy this type of freedom because the workers under their control are kept imprisoned by a ruthless set of circumstances. This economic imprisonment, to the bourgeois at any rate, is considered ‘fair’ and ‘applicable’ to the situation of the workers who in reality need a job (any job) to put food on the table, as although workers can in theory change jobs, they cannot at any time change classes. Workers are wage-slaves and are not ‘free’ in any bourgeois definition of the term. The bourgeois use the smokescreen of continuously stating that the workers are ‘free’ because they do not have to work for this or that manager, firm, or company, etc. No matter where the worker goes he or she is never free from bourgeois oppression and so workers come together into mutually benefitting groups or unions (i.e. Soviets). It is ‘collectively’ and collective action that benefits the workers and not bourgeois individuality. Individuality means nothing to a worker who is permanently excluded from the institutions and establishments that represent individualistic bourgeois society. The Scientific Socialism of Marx and Engels works from the premise of collective action taken on the part of the working class as it ceases or takes political power from the middle class. This creates a Socialist Society that is egalitarian and fair, whilst the political, social, economic and cultural conditions are created for a transition into a Communist Society where the bourgeois class model dissolves and a new physical and psychological era is created. This is why ‘individuality’ is viewed as a bourgeois disease by Communist ideologues as it is believed to denote the presence of a polluting bourgeois mind-set. As the Western bourgeois criticised the Soviet Union only from its limited and class-ridden view of the world, it is seen in the literature continuously lamenting the apparent loss of ‘individuality’ within the Soviet Union. It has to adopt this position because the entire structure of privileged bourgeois existence evolves around the ‘individuality’ its exploitation of the working masses earns for it and obviously Communism (as an end to working class oppression) is its ideological nemesis. As a consequence, the ideologues of the USSR were forever watchful of the presence of bourgeois ‘individuality’ developing amongst the Soviet workforce and the potential problems such occurrences could cause. Being considered ‘scientific’ in nature, this critique sort to identify, explain, and solve the presence of bourgeois ‘individuality’ within Soviet society so that the Communist spirit of working class ‘collectively’ and ‘solidarity’ could be not be damaged in any way. Therefore in the realms of Soviet academia, Communist scientists worked for the collective and never for themselves. This is because it was considered society as a whole that had provided the individual with all the material requirements to make him or her a scientist, a process that had nothing to do with ‘individuality’ or ‘private’ interests. Soviet citizens were encouraged to think in non-bourgeois ways and to literally ‘free’ their collective thinking processes in order to develop ever more efficient and innovated ways of understanding and dominating the natural world. In this regard, Scientific Socialism is really the initiation of the full scope of the human intellect freed from the limited parameters of the bourgeois mode of existence. After the 1917 Russian Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, the Western bourgeoisie spent its time furiously engaged in trying to retain its oppressive hold on its own working class, whilst simultaneously desperately trying to claw-back its physical and psychological influence in the USSR. This counter-revolutionary effort was resisted for decades on every front in the USSR, until the bourgeois-infected administration of Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. This led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, due to Gorbachev fully embracing bourgeois individuality and the mock morality of religion and capitalism it inspires.
Soviet science had defined the bourgeois ‘inverted’ mind-set as a form of institutional mental illness as it was ‘inverted’ (i.e. back to front) in its functioning, was anti-science by definition, was the product of a system-wide exploitation within society, and was only motivated by the prospect of the loss or gain of monetary profit. Fortescue’s book mentioned above falls into all of these categories and is typical of the anti-Soviet Western propaganda of the Cold War Era. Fortescue, being the representative of the affronted (and apparently afflicted) middle class, writes from the perspective of one sufferer of mental illness striving authoritatively to communicate with other sufferers of the same affliction. As a consequence the Soviet Union (or more correctly its non-capitalist system) is painted in the guise of the ‘mad scientist’ who is perceived as staggering down a corridor holding a syringe of indeterminate content threatening to cure all and sundry. Fortescue’s book is a very good example of very bad British academia. As Fortescue – being a bourgeois academic within a bourgeois system – has no genuine first-hand information about the USSR and so he resorts to merely quoting or passing on other distorted or false viewpoints from others who are as equally misinformed as himself. This is essentially the bourgeois system talking to itself about a subject it does not understand and engaging in ’myth-making’ to hid the fact. The other ‘source’ of information Fortescue quotes is that of traitors to the USSR who had abandoned their country and fled to the West – he refers to them as ‘emigres’. It is well-known today that part of the process of being granted political asylum in the West during the Cold War was to assist with its anti-Soviet programmes of disinformation and misrepresentation, therefore this source of information is academically unsound. However, every so often, and albeit completely out of context, Fortescue quotes from what he claims to be legitimate Soviet texts. On page 48 Fortescue shares the views of Petr Fedosseev (who is described by Fortescue as the ‘chief ideologue’ of the Soviet Academy of Sciences) who discusses the problem of bourgeois individualism in the Soviet workforce:
The bourgeois system is middle class in nature. A minority of people within a society possess the majority of the nation’s wealth and virtually all the political power. The working class – who comprise the majority of the people living in a bourgeois system – perform all the productive labour and create all of the real wealth but due to the inherent and defining inequality of bourgeois society, the worker does not own the means of production, does not own the fruits of his or her labour, and is given only a very small percentage of the immense profit his or her work creates. This mass of workers lead an impoverished life and are more or less excluded from any effective participation in the middle class system or political arena. This is why it is in the best interests of the bourgeoisie to ensure that the workers are kept in this state of physical servitude and mental ignorance. For the Bourgeois, individual freedom is attained on the backs of numerous faceless workers. The workers suffer and strive for no significant reward and no meaningful changes in their circumstances, whilst their managers reap the rewards of immense profit and extended leisure time. This is why the bourgeoisie value ‘individuality’ so highly because it is the freedom they have ‘exploited’ out of the worker. As the bourgeoisie controls the banks, educational establishments, the church and the political system, they are ‘individually’ free to use their immense financial power to literally ‘buy’ any experience of freedom they choose. For the humble worker who lacks any political, social or financial power, the only apparent freedom is that of participating in the very exploitative system that defines existence as a continuous relentless and detrimental struggle. Scientific Socialism firstly explains this detrimental situation to the worker, and in so doing sets off a domino-effect of initiating the mind of the worker into a full and intellectual activation that had previously been denied him or her by the bourgeois system, as by and large the working class is denied any meaningful access to further or higher education. The worker learns exactly what the bourgeois system is and what it represents. More importantly, the worker learns about his or her own plight and develops an understanding about what to do to permanently change things for the better. In short the worker is entirely empowered and is taught that the mind of the bourgeois is anti-scientific because of its inverted ‘religious’ nature that mistakes a ‘thought’ of a deity in the head with the presence of an actual deity existing independently within the physical world. The implication of this insight is startling because it indicates that bourgeois ‘science’ is not free and must always remain within the constraints of bourgeois-defined ideological norms. Bourgeois science is carried-out by a privileged educational elite that have been taught to use their minds in a non-inverted manner whilst pursuing scientific research, but which retain exactly the same bourgeois ‘inverted’ mind in their so-called ‘private’ life. This leads to the bizarre situation where a scientist who routinely makes professional use of a non-religious mind-set, also retains the very same religiously motived (and inverted) mind-set of the Judeo-Christian religion that had kept European thinking in the darkness of superstition, for well over the last one thousand years! This somewhat ‘bipolar’ and thoroughly contradictory vision of reality the bourgeois refers to as ‘choice’, and considers the notion of ‘individuality’ as its preferred mode of transport.
In a bourgeois society that considers itself ‘free’ it is only the middle class that possess the wealth and social connections to enjoy this perceived freedom. The bourgeois enjoy this type of freedom because the workers under their control are kept imprisoned by a ruthless set of circumstances. This economic imprisonment, to the bourgeois at any rate, is considered ‘fair’ and ‘applicable’ to the situation of the workers who in reality need a job (any job) to put food on the table, as although workers can in theory change jobs, they cannot at any time change classes. Workers are wage-slaves and are not ‘free’ in any bourgeois definition of the term. The bourgeois use the smokescreen of continuously stating that the workers are ‘free’ because they do not have to work for this or that manager, firm, or company, etc. No matter where the worker goes he or she is never free from bourgeois oppression and so workers come together into mutually benefitting groups or unions (i.e. Soviets). It is ‘collectively’ and collective action that benefits the workers and not bourgeois individuality. Individuality means nothing to a worker who is permanently excluded from the institutions and establishments that represent individualistic bourgeois society. The Scientific Socialism of Marx and Engels works from the premise of collective action taken on the part of the working class as it ceases or takes political power from the middle class. This creates a Socialist Society that is egalitarian and fair, whilst the political, social, economic and cultural conditions are created for a transition into a Communist Society where the bourgeois class model dissolves and a new physical and psychological era is created. This is why ‘individuality’ is viewed as a bourgeois disease by Communist ideologues as it is believed to denote the presence of a polluting bourgeois mind-set. As the Western bourgeois criticised the Soviet Union only from its limited and class-ridden view of the world, it is seen in the literature continuously lamenting the apparent loss of ‘individuality’ within the Soviet Union. It has to adopt this position because the entire structure of privileged bourgeois existence evolves around the ‘individuality’ its exploitation of the working masses earns for it and obviously Communism (as an end to working class oppression) is its ideological nemesis. As a consequence, the ideologues of the USSR were forever watchful of the presence of bourgeois ‘individuality’ developing amongst the Soviet workforce and the potential problems such occurrences could cause. Being considered ‘scientific’ in nature, this critique sort to identify, explain, and solve the presence of bourgeois ‘individuality’ within Soviet society so that the Communist spirit of working class ‘collectively’ and ‘solidarity’ could be not be damaged in any way. Therefore in the realms of Soviet academia, Communist scientists worked for the collective and never for themselves. This is because it was considered society as a whole that had provided the individual with all the material requirements to make him or her a scientist, a process that had nothing to do with ‘individuality’ or ‘private’ interests. Soviet citizens were encouraged to think in non-bourgeois ways and to literally ‘free’ their collective thinking processes in order to develop ever more efficient and innovated ways of understanding and dominating the natural world. In this regard, Scientific Socialism is really the initiation of the full scope of the human intellect freed from the limited parameters of the bourgeois mode of existence. After the 1917 Russian Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, the Western bourgeoisie spent its time furiously engaged in trying to retain its oppressive hold on its own working class, whilst simultaneously desperately trying to claw-back its physical and psychological influence in the USSR. This counter-revolutionary effort was resisted for decades on every front in the USSR, until the bourgeois-infected administration of Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. This led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, due to Gorbachev fully embracing bourgeois individuality and the mock morality of religion and capitalism it inspires.
Soviet science had defined the bourgeois ‘inverted’ mind-set as a form of institutional mental illness as it was ‘inverted’ (i.e. back to front) in its functioning, was anti-science by definition, was the product of a system-wide exploitation within society, and was only motivated by the prospect of the loss or gain of monetary profit. Fortescue’s book mentioned above falls into all of these categories and is typical of the anti-Soviet Western propaganda of the Cold War Era. Fortescue, being the representative of the affronted (and apparently afflicted) middle class, writes from the perspective of one sufferer of mental illness striving authoritatively to communicate with other sufferers of the same affliction. As a consequence the Soviet Union (or more correctly its non-capitalist system) is painted in the guise of the ‘mad scientist’ who is perceived as staggering down a corridor holding a syringe of indeterminate content threatening to cure all and sundry. Fortescue’s book is a very good example of very bad British academia. As Fortescue – being a bourgeois academic within a bourgeois system – has no genuine first-hand information about the USSR and so he resorts to merely quoting or passing on other distorted or false viewpoints from others who are as equally misinformed as himself. This is essentially the bourgeois system talking to itself about a subject it does not understand and engaging in ’myth-making’ to hid the fact. The other ‘source’ of information Fortescue quotes is that of traitors to the USSR who had abandoned their country and fled to the West – he refers to them as ‘emigres’. It is well-known today that part of the process of being granted political asylum in the West during the Cold War was to assist with its anti-Soviet programmes of disinformation and misrepresentation, therefore this source of information is academically unsound. However, every so often, and albeit completely out of context, Fortescue quotes from what he claims to be legitimate Soviet texts. On page 48 Fortescue shares the views of Petr Fedosseev (who is described by Fortescue as the ‘chief ideologue’ of the Soviet Academy of Sciences) who discusses the problem of bourgeois individualism in the Soviet workforce:
‘I must draw the attention of the reader to the fact that signs of individualism appear more often among people whose work is essentially of an isolated character. This can be seen in individual cases in science, literature and the arts, where at times individualistic qualities and habits can appear and take root… It is in this area (and often around it) that operate certain people placing themselves outside, and even worse, above society. The boundless, even morbid ambition and, I would say, pathological self-opiniatedness of these people is nothing more than an extreme form of individualism. Those who have been gripped by a mania for power, have declared themselves newly appeared geniuses and claim a special place in society, but not receiving privileges or any satisfaction of their demands, inevitably come into conflict with society, overtly or covertly, silently or stridently.’
Of course this is a striking and inspiring critique of the selfishness that is the essence of the capitalist system – to which Fortescue and others like him in the pay of the bourgeois system, respond with disinformation disguised as informed academia. This apriori approach to misrepresenting the Soviet Union is to be expected in the West during the Cold War which came to an end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, but it is surprising to find this deliberately deceptive Cold War ‘line’ still being pursued well into the 21st century. Richard Milner’s book entitled ‘Darwin’s Universe – Evolution A-Z (published in 2009) is a very good reference book for a wide array of Darwin-related material. Its reference about Karl Marx and Scientific Socialism is refreshingly positive, as its admittance that by the standards of our time today, Darwin should be considered a racist for the manner in which he coached some of his explanations whilst describing the machinations of evolution through natural selection. Over-all this book has a leftwing feel to it in every way apart from its treatment of the Soviet Union (which occurs on page 120) and its innovative scientist named Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976). Lysenko was a peasant who benefited greatly from the Communist Revolution. Being a peasant he had an intimate knowledge of farming and working with nature. Early Soviet scientific thinking broke entirely with the privilege bourgeois tradition of the capitalist West that only extensively educates those children who happen to be from wealthy families. We have seen how the bourgeoisie as a dominant class, operates a ‘closed system’ that does not allow any workers in, or any exploiters out. Part of the Cold War misrepresentation of the Soviet Union has involved an ‘intellectual’ assault designed to continue the bourgeois denigration of the working class ability to ‘think’ for itself, and devise systems applicable to its needs and requirements in the world. Milner, reproducing the Western bourgeois misrepresentation of the USSR states:
‘Long after Lamarckian inheritance had been abandoned elsewhere, Russia stubbornly retained this 19th-century belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Party theorists refused to accept that each generation must be educated anew, believing socialism would create permanent genetic transformations in the population.
Under Trofim Lysenko’s dominance of Soviet science, “Mendelist” genetics was a forbidden doctrine, a bourgeois heresy. Lysenkoism was finally abandoned in the 1960’s, but only after Lysenko’s fraudulent research brought on agricultural disaster, which threatened the country with starvation.’
Under Trofim Lysenko’s dominance of Soviet science, “Mendelist” genetics was a forbidden doctrine, a bourgeois heresy. Lysenkoism was finally abandoned in the 1960’s, but only after Lysenko’s fraudulent research brought on agricultural disaster, which threatened the country with starvation.’
For a book (and author) that presents a thoroughly sentimentalist approach to analysing Darwinism in all its many aspects, these two paragraphs come across as appallingly rightwing and fascistic in nature. Milner deals with a highly complex and important aspect of human history with a brevity and disdain that he does not show, for instance, to the Nazi German regime and its application of a racist Darwinism (which is plainly the consequence of Darwin’s racist statements contained in his ‘The Descent of Man’). Milner omits that Darwinism died something of a theoretical death following the popularity of Mendelian Genetics in the early 1900’s – not experiencing a revival until after WWII. From around 1900 – 1945 the work of the French genius Lamarck came very much back into fashion throughout the English speaking world. Again Milner further ignores that much if not all of the suffering in the Soviet Union stemmed from the period of the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) which saw the bourgeois powers in the world (that had just stopped fighting one another during WWI) invade Russia in an attempt to put an end to the Revolution and re-establish the bourgeois friendly Czarist regime. The invading bourgeois belligerents included troops from the USA, UK, Greece, Australia and Italy, etc. The three year war helped the Western forces to de-stabilise Russia, disrupt the planting and harvesting of crops, terrorise and kill its people, and prevent the Communist Party from being able to make life immediately better for the Russian people. Czarist Russia was a backward and virtually bankrupt feudalistic state under the old regime – and it is this corrupt system that the Western bourgeoisie sort to re-establish by force of arms under the guise that their presence was to ‘assist’ those who did not support Lenin and his Bolshevik. The eventual defeat of the West and the subsequent establishment of the Soviet Union allowed the workers to finally take control of their country and immediately set about freeing the human mind from the shackles of bourgeois oppression and limitation. Trofim Lysenko had to work within a devastated country that lacked the accumulated wealth and industrial might of its bourgeois enemies in the West. Western narratives that attack Lysenko are really attacking and demeaning the international working class. The bourgeois always demean the working class to prevent it from acquiring the psychological and physical skills needed to take power. Lysenko has become a particular target as a means of attacking Soviet science in general. Lysenko’s scientific papers are cogent, to the point and thoroughly proletariat in nature. Even after the Soviet Union formally recognised Darwinian evolutionary theory as correct in 1948, Lysenko still continued to deliver effective and wide-sweeping criticism of certain aspects of Darwinian thinking:
Report by Lysenko to the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences
Milner attacks the Soviet Science of Socialist Genetics in a sentence or two, continuing his strange and unscientific assault on the USSR. He offers no academic evidence to support his statements but continues to ensure that any reader of his book is never drawn to what he perceives as the ‘corrupt’ ideology of Socialism. The science of Epigenetics today very much revives the work of Lamarck and throws doubt on the dominance of Milner’s assertion that every generation must learn anew. Lysenko remained incredibly popular in the USSR up until his retirement in 1965 – although by that time Soviet science had developed many great scientists in its own right and had made numerous advances and breakthroughs in human knowledge. Although Lysenko was highly respected up until the end of his life, he never really possessed the kind of messianic influence Milner suggests in a Socialist society that rejected individualism as a bourgeois sham. Milner is wrong when he claims Lysenko ‘dominated’ Soviet science, and it is interesting to consider how Milner quite naturally fulfils the role of US bourgeois academic expressing the distorted views and disinformation demanded by his paymasters.
©opyright: Adrian Chan-Wyles (ShiDaDao) 2015.
Report by Lysenko to the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences
Milner attacks the Soviet Science of Socialist Genetics in a sentence or two, continuing his strange and unscientific assault on the USSR. He offers no academic evidence to support his statements but continues to ensure that any reader of his book is never drawn to what he perceives as the ‘corrupt’ ideology of Socialism. The science of Epigenetics today very much revives the work of Lamarck and throws doubt on the dominance of Milner’s assertion that every generation must learn anew. Lysenko remained incredibly popular in the USSR up until his retirement in 1965 – although by that time Soviet science had developed many great scientists in its own right and had made numerous advances and breakthroughs in human knowledge. Although Lysenko was highly respected up until the end of his life, he never really possessed the kind of messianic influence Milner suggests in a Socialist society that rejected individualism as a bourgeois sham. Milner is wrong when he claims Lysenko ‘dominated’ Soviet science, and it is interesting to consider how Milner quite naturally fulfils the role of US bourgeois academic expressing the distorted views and disinformation demanded by his paymasters.
©opyright: Adrian Chan-Wyles (ShiDaDao) 2015.