Hilary Rose

Rereading Titmuss: The Sexual Division of Welfare

The new social policy demonstrates its theoretical concern with the relations between the welfare services, the economy and the state. This new found political economy of welfare leaves behind the micro-concerns of the Titmuss paradigm. Through a critical re-examination of Titmuss, the article, while welcoming the research programme of the new social policy, urges that the specific strength of the old (especially so far as women are concerned) is not prematurely abandoned. In a period of economic and political crisis, where the state is actively restructuring the provision of welfare, detailed and systematical analyses of the implications of this process for both class and gender are urgently required. The need for work on gender is underlined because of the sex blindness of influential Liberal and Left theoretical writings. It is not that such theorists are unfriendly to feminist work but rather that it stands ‘outside’ their explanation. The need to reconceptualize welfare as a service provided primarily by the paid and unpaid labour of women remains.

The Radicalisation of Science

Over the last five years there has been a clear shift in consciousness of many scientists-especially science students--of the role of science and technology in contemporary capitalism. This movement has been concentrated in the U.S.A. and Britain, the two most scientifically advanced Western countries, judged by such formal criteria as percentage of GNP spent on science, or numbers of papers published or Nobel prizes per head of the population.

Israel, Europe and the academic boycott

From competing in the Eurovision song contest to participating in the European Research Area, Israel is beneficially treated as a European nation. Yet its violations of international law against the Palestinians, attested in UN resolutions and in contravention of Europes own humanitarian conventions, attract no international sanctions. The academic boycott of Israel, following the wide-ranging boycott of South Africa that helped to publicise and end the iniquities of apartheid, aims to focus attention on issues of human rights, in the hope of securing a just peace in Palestine/Israel. The parameters of the boycott and the opposition mounted against it are explored here by two of its leading proponents, even as they expose the double standards to which Israeli and Palestinian students and academics are subjected.

Hyper-Reflexivity — a New Danger for the Counter-Movements

I don’t know if anyone reads straight through an edited collection of papers such as this volume, or whether, as I confess I usually do, they dip in and out, attracted by a modish title or the author or subject one has some familiarity with already. But to read this book from the beginning is to experience a constellation of voices, some writing directly out of their own personal and subjective experience, all commenting, analysing, attempting to apply the tools of sociology to the phenomenon. Indeed, when we developed the idea of a book on counter-movements in the sciences and invited contributions to it, this was what we anticipated. For the issues raised by such a title, and the difficulties of those trapped within the contradictions of science as it is practised in this society, are multifaceted. We recognised from the beginning that this book would inevitably be as much a declaration of the experience as an analysis of its meaning.

Chemical Spraying as Reported by Refugees from South Vietnam

Ninety-eight refugees who had been exposed to chemical sprays in South Vietnam were interviewed in Hanoi. Most reported effects on eyes and skin and gastrointestinal upsets. Ninety-two percent suffered fatigue, prolonged or indefinite in 17 percent of cases. Reports of abortions and monstrous births in sprayed humans and animals and of substantial numbers of deaths among fish, fowl, and pigs were also given.

Can Science Be Neutral

This organization believes that the development of science is not predetermined, but should depend upon the social choices of the community and the individual choices of the scientist. In furtherance of this belief the organization has the following aims: (a)To stimulate amongst scientists an awareness of the social significance of science and of their corresponding social responsibilities, both individually and collectively. (b)To draw the attention of all to the political, social and economic pressures affecting the development of science. (c)To draw public attention to the implications and consequences of scientific development and thus to create an informed public which can exercise choice in these matters. [1]

‘Do not adjust your mind, there is a fault in reality’— ideology in neurobiology

Abstract The paper considers the relationship between scientific knowledge and the social context within which science is done. Because of the relationship of science and scientists to the state, scientific paradigms may be ideological, and much that is done in the name of science may itself be ideologically saturated. The dominant ideology in neurobiology is that of reductionism, and indeed reductionism is argued by its proponents to constitute the scientific method, with ethical overtones, whilst opponents of science cite reductionism as exemplifying the inevitably oppressive nature of science. Within neurobiology, several types of reductionism are considered. Molecular reductionism seeks biological causes for socially observed events, for instance, schizophrenia and depression. Its consequences, in relationship to ‘minimal brain dysfunction’ and psychosurgery, are considered. Genetic determinism in relation, e.g., to intelligence (IQ), is another form of this type of reductionism. Evolutionary reductionism attempts to explain human behavior in terms of that of primates and other non-human animals, hence seeking to justify the existing social order as dependent on a biological base. Category reductionism includes behaviorism and machine reductionism; in this latter, attempts are made to reduce the brain to the interactions of simply modellable logical neuronal networks. Against reductionism, autonomism as a separate type of paradigm is briefly discussed and rejected. A non-ideological, and hence scientific and non-oppressive paradigm, would be a version of interactionism, dialectical materialism; such a science cannot be fully realized except in a transformed society.

THE INCORPORATION OF SCIENCE

The capitalist mode of production requires continuous innovation in all spheres of life, the creation of new commodities, new technologies, new ideas and new social forms. It is the business of natural science to aid in this process of innovation. Thus under capitalism natural science acts as a direct productive force, continuously invading and transforming all areas of human existence. Marx himself saw that nineteenth-century science acted both as a direct force of capitalist production and also as a means for social control — for the maintenance of the capitalist order. Yet these roles were only partially visible and immanent in nineteenth-century science. It is the thesis of this chapter that, from the mid-twentieth century on, the twin roles of science as a force of production and of social control have become both dominant and manifest, and that this transition is linked with a change in the mode of the production of scientific knowledge, from essentially craft to industrialised production. This change in the mode of production of science has developed over a long period, with some branches of science, such as chemistry, becoming industrialised in the nineteenth-century, and some still to fully undergo the transformation, but from 1945 onwards industrialised science has been the dominant mode.

The Politics of Neurobiology: Biologism in the Service of the State

Biologism is the attempt to locate the cause of the existing structure of human society, and of the relationships of individuals within it, in the biological character of the human animal. For biologism, all the richness of human experience and the varying historical forms of human relationships merely represent the product of underlying biological structures; human societies are governed by the same laws as ape societies, the way that an individual responds to his or her environment is determined by the innate properties of the DNA molecules to be found in brain or germ cells. In a word, the human condition is reduced to mere biology, which in its turn is no more than a special case of the laws of chemistry and hence of physics.

The changing face of human nature

ly short decade’s march toward the sequencing of the human genome, one of its key initiators, geneticist Walter Gilbert, claimed that “one will be able to pull a cd out of one’s pocket and say, ‘Here is a human being; it’s me.’”1 Gilbert’s brilliant piece of theater was echoed by other leading molecular biologists in their campaign to win public support and enthusiasm for the Human Genome Project (hgp). It seemed not to matter how often the biologists employed the same theatrical device, whether in California or at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts: holding up a cd to a spellbound audience and saying, “this is human life itself” was a brilliantly chosen trope. The cd, so familiar to the audience of a hightech society, was recruited to symbolize the merger of molecularization and digitalization heralded by the developing hgp. At once a science and a technology, this technoscience of human genomics simultaneously offered a new de1⁄2nition of human nature and new, promethean powers to repair and even redesign that nature. dna and genomics dominated the media throughout the 1990s, with its deterministic gene talk and genes for everything from the most severe diseases to compulsive shopping and homelessness. While the cd played its part in the popularization of the hgp, it was the representation of dna’s double helix that came to be the dominant signi1⁄2er of life itself. More subversively, numbers of graphic artists saw the potential surveillance powers of genomics, striking a more critical note than the cds or the double helix by, instead, showing people with bar-coded foreheads. Here human nature was reduced to a mere commodity with no agency, to be read at the checkout counter. The explosive growth of genomics, with its relatively subdued cultural debate, was not alone. Another powerful and expanding 1⁄2eld, namely, neurobiology, led to the 1990s being nominated by the National Institutes of Health as the Decade of the Brain. (Europe was slower; its Brain Decade started about 1⁄2ve years later.) By 2009, on both sides of the pond, neuroscientists claimed that advances in brain science had been so substantial that it had become the Decade of the Mind. Just as the double helix became the symbol of the hgp, so have the vivid, false-color skull-shaped images locating the “sites” of brain activity come to symbolize the new neuro-