Ideology, Capitalism, and Science

The function of science and technology as an ideological support for capitalism has fundamentally changed in recent years. While previously, as pointed out by the Frankfurt School, science and technology under the guise of objective neutrality, would be constantly evoked by the bourgeois as justification for capitalism. The argument operated in that capitalism was seen as scientific, a natural system based on the observation of natural interaction between human beings, and that capitalism facilitated technological development.

Today science and technology now longer plays the role of an ideological support for capitalism. It has become virtually impossible to rationalize the dominance of capitalism by appeals to science and technology. Science is increasingly critical of capitalism, with the best example being global warming. Science here runs up head on against capitalism, as science demands the economy be altered to deal with this problem, while capital is weary of change since it is driven by short term profit. Technology is increasingly becoming an obstacle to capitalism rather than its product, the digitialization of media makes distributing content over the internet a simple process. Thus we have the big media corporations, such as the music industry, waging a continued war against technological change since it threatens their profit.

The interesting aspect of this reversal of the role of science and technology as ideological supports for capitalism, is that it needed to look elsewhere for such support and found it in the realm of religion. Today's neoliberal form of capitalism everywhere in the world aligns itself with religious movements in order to maintain hegemony. In the United States it is evangelical Christianity, in Turkey it is Islam, in China and Singapore it is traditional "Asian values", in India it is Hinduism. This alliance between religion and capital is then harnessed to attack science and novel technologies as not just undermining capitalism, but as undermining moral values. Climate change is then not simply an inconvenient truth which requires political and economic change, but a competing world view which is inherently irreligious and immoral.

For this reason leftist activists need to align themselves with science and technology and explicitly oppose the resurgence of religion. Unfortunately due to the continued popularity of postmodernism among the left, there remains a hostility to the grand narrative and universality of science, in favour of the particularized local truth claims of religion. In this way the postmodern left is operating as a de facto ideological supplement to capitalism, and this is why the left is failing as a truly oppositional movement in recent times.