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Science and Socialism: The Lysenko Controversy
CAPITALISTS AND anti-Marxists are fond of using the case of TD Lysenko and the Lysenkoist movement in the Soviet Union in the 1930s - 1960s as the dreadful spectre of what happens to science under socialism. In Russia today, the Lysenko period is a painful memory, seen as an aberration in the history of biology in that country, to be explained by the "cult of personality" as Stalin's purges and repression were explained away. Some "dissident' Russian scientists justify their own technocratic views by saying that the Lysenko movement illustrates the disastrous consequences of allowing science to be influenced by politics or ideology (as though science were neutral in the West). JBS Haldane, one of the world's leading classical geneticists when Lysenko's influence was at its height, was also a leading member of the British CP, with a regular science column in the Daily Worker. He resigned from the CP over the Lysenko affair. Maoist sects today believe that Lysenko was right and that he promoted a "materialist method in natural science" by "seeking truth from facts" rather than "seeking facts to prove pre-conceived notions in biology". Lastly, "radical science' writers like Hilary and Steven Rose believe that the Lysenkoist movement was part of an attempt at a cultural revolution, to replace "bourgeois" science with "Marxist" science, but which failed.
Theories
and
of evolution
genetics
The "Lysenkoist movement" thus produced strong reactions across the spectrum of political opinion. What was it? Any serious Marxist interested in science needs to explain how these ideas arose, and for a time, gained widespread support, in the context of the material and political circumstances of Russia at the time. This article is intended as a contribution to a discussion of these theoretical issues.
Lysenko originally proposed a series of recipes for improving agricultural yields. He later developed a theory of heredity that challenged traditional genetic theory (based on Mendel's work), as incompatible with dialectical materialism. In practice, however, Lysenko failed to create a new science to replace genetics; set back the
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(previously pioneering) Russian work in biology for 20 - 30 years; established an enormous obstacle to the idea that Marxism or dialectical materialism can make any contribution to natural science; made no noticeable positive contribution to biology; and failed to produce a radical breakthrough in agriculture.
To explain the Lysenkoist movement, however, it is necessary first to outline the state of genetic theory that Lysenko claimed to have disproved; and secondly to explain the conditions in Russia that existed at the time, particularly in relation to agriculture.
According to Darwin, natural selection is the mechanism for evolution. Organisms vary, and these variations are inherited, at least in part, by their offspring. Organisms that vary most strongly in directions favoured by the environment will survive and propagate. So favourable variation accumulates in populations by natural selection. Variation is thus random, or at least not preferentially inclined towards adaptation, and natural selection, according to Darwin, is the creative force of evolution and does not just eliminate the individuals that do not vary in the appropriate way. Evolution is thus a mixture of chance and necessity -chance at the level of variation, necessity in the working of selection.
This differs from an earlier theory, put forward by Lamarck, whereby the individual adapts itself to its environment, and passes on these acquired traits to its offspring. Debate about the relative merits of Lamarck's inheritance of acquired characters and natural selection continued for many years, and was by no means settled at the time of Lysenko, although the majority of biologists by then favoured natural selection, particularly following work on the study of cells and the rediscovery of the experiments of Mendel, which supplied further details about the mechanism of inheritance, especially at the level of the individual.
Mendel's work suggested that characteristics were inherited as a whole, from one or other parent, but not a blend of both. The factors in the parent that are inherited by the offspring are what are now called genes. Around 1900, improvements in the microscope and in techniques for using it, made it possible to see the inter-
nal structure of a cell, and led to the discovery of genes and chromosomes. (Chromosomes are arrays of many genes). This work led to the foundation of classical genetics.
It was not until the 1950s that the chemical composition of genes was established as DNA and its structure worked out. The precise arrangement of the chemical molecule of DNA is the "blueprint" for the next generation. This work led to the establishment of yet another branch of science, molecular biology. Experiments suggested that DNA can issue instructions for making a new individual but the individual cannot send information back to the genetic material. This evidence supports Darwin's and Mendel's earlier work, but contradicts the theory of Lamarck, since it does not allow for the transfer of information from the individual to the genetic material. However, the theory of inheritance of acquired characters has continued to have supporters, and from time to time evidence appears in support of it.
Agriculture and biology
in tsarist Russia
However, some experiments, which in the 1930s appeared to demonstrate the inheritance of acquired characters, were explained in the 1950s by the discovery of genetic assimilation, whereby latent genetic differences within populations are revealed-but not created-by environmental treatment, and therefore become available for selection. Most recently, the work of Steele and Groczynski seems to have demonstrated that acquired tolerance to an injected antigen may be inherited. A mechanism whereby some naturally occurring RNA virus may be able to alter the genetic material may yet be established. Work on this- and the debate-continues.
In Western Europe modern farming developed, largely on the basis of trial and error, and before scientists could explain it or provide practical assistance. "Scientific farming"' began to emerge only in the second half of the 19th century as the sciences of chemistry and biology were able to analyse what the farmers were doing in practice and develop ways of doing it more effectively.
In Russia, however, way round. Under the
it was the other Tsars, the crip-
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Lenin at the testing of the first Russian electric plough on the experimental farm of the Moscow Higher Zootechnical Institute. The Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky attempted to harness the knowledge of existing bourgeois specialists under democratic workers" pling burden of serfdom prevented any modernisation in farming methods. Peasants stuck to the medieval methods of their ancestors right up to the 1917 revolution, and well afterwards in many cases. Even if they had known about modern methods they would have been unable to afford mineral fertilisers or new varieties of seed. Even the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was more a reorganisation of oppression than an improvement in conditions, as were subsequent attempts at reform. On the other hand, from time to time, the various Tsars were aware of the need to modernise the country and made various attempts to do so without altering its social structure, but by encouraging science and technology. The main policy was to encourage science and technology by providing money for higher education and for research, but not provide primary education for the peasants. Thus, the biological sciences developed far in advance of agricultural methods. For example, Russian botanists began to organise the world's greatest collection of plants from which they hoped to breed new varieties according to the new science of genetics, while Russian peasants were planting by scattering or "broadcasting"' mongrel folk varieties of seed, in just the same way as described in the bible. Soil science was founded in Russia, but the Russian farmers were meanwhile following grain-tallow rotation on small strips of land in ways described in the Domesday book in Medieval England. Even after the 1905 revolution, the government still paid more attention to funding agricultural science than in making it possible to put new ideas into practice.
The new workers state survived famine, drought, civil war and the intervention of foreign powers. But these events devastated agriculture. After the revolution most peasants were only interested in owning their own land. They did not turn overnight into experts in modern farming methods, and even if they had, the enormous numbers of tiny strips of land ruled out new methods of planting, growing and harvesting, and put investment in machinery out of reach of individual families. The Bolsheviks favoured collectivisation of farms, to produce larger units capable of innovation. They proposed setting up model collective farms which would demonstrate the advantages of new agricultural techniques and of collective farming. This would be a slow process: in the takeover of the estates from the old landlords, even the model farms belonging to innovating landlordscontrol.
which Lenin tried hard to preserve were divided up into small primitive landholdings, rather than being taken over as whole entities.
Meanwhile, many of the scientists were, if anything, more hostile to the Bolsheviks than they had been to Tsarism. But they needed government support to continue their work, while the new state desperately needed the development of all the sciences that would make possible industrial and agricultural development. This proved to be the basis of an agreement between the scientists and the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks attitude to specialists Lenin in particular adopted a very careful policy of winning their support or at least their co-operation. He gave the scientists every support, including defending their autonomy in developing theories and methods. Trotsky described his attitude in a speech to chemists: "When any Marxist tried to convert Marx's theory into a universal skeleton key and fitted it through other fields of knowledge, Vladimir Ilyich would rebuke him with the expressive little phrase: 'communist conceit'. This would signify in particular: communism does not replace chemistry." But the Bolsheviks also made it clear that while scientists with pro-capitalist views would be allowed to do their work as they thought necessary, they not be allowed to organise would against the workers state. The governdefended the ment agricultural research centres against liquidation by the peasants.
"Even the manners of the new leaders were a reassuring surprise, said Joravsky in The Lysenko Affair. They contrasted favourably "with the haughty bearing of tsarist ministers. soliciting the specialists, Agriculture sat at a common table with them, sharing their weak, barely sweetened tea in a tin cup, taking no more food than the standard ration (an ounce of bread). " Tulaikov, the country's leading expert on agriculture spoke about the same meeting: "Thus at a moment that was very grave for the directors of our life (the civil war had begun) a close conagricultural specialists and the new workers dedicated to their cherished cause, honourably, without any duplicity, offering their knowledge and experience to the new upbuilding, and second, specialists who loved their work, who were seriously prepared to defend any undeserved attacks wherever they might come from." Science expanded Bolsheviks. Vavilov, director of the All - Union Institute of Plant Industry and of the Academy of Sciences Institute of Genetics, had an extraordinary talent for organising support and funds for research, for firing both the Bolsheviks and other scientists with enthusiasm, for recognising the importance of other people's work, for his colleagues, and for establishing internationally recognised centres of research, as well as for his own work on genetics.
In terms of practical benefit to 31
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MIR Autumn 1986: Lysenko agriculture, however, the gap between Russian science and Russian farming was, if anything, wider than ever. Tulaikov commented on the still primitive state of most farms, with many weeds, little fertiliser and no seed drill or proper rotation, which would wipe out any advantage to be gained from using improved strains of seed, even where farmers were convinced they should buy it. The problem was to link biological developments economic tasks and possibilities. Vavilov spoke of "the planned and rational utilisation of the resources of the terrestrial globe" and the potential of the new science of genetics "to sculpt organic forms at will...Biological synthesis is becoming as much a reality as chemical." This the potential of the science: and still is. Even today, however, with all the intervening in biochemistry, developments molecular biology and genetic engineering, and all the accumulated experimental data and technical experience, biology is far from providing the plant breeder with a complete chart of basic elements of all plants and animals from which to "scuipt organic forms at will. The Bolsheviks took it for granted that investment in the sciences related to agriculture would only lead to benefits in the future, when the science itself was more fully developed, and, in particular, when the farmers were able to take advantage of it.
Rise of Stalinism The German Revolution was defeated and the workers state in Russia was both economically backward and isolated. A bureaucratic clique developed under Stalin which turned Russia into a deformed parody of a workers state, removing all democratic controls from the workers.
The bureaucracy decreed that socialism would be built in one country, and in the late 1920's adopted a programme of forced industrialisation. That in turn meant getting a large enough supply of food at a low enough price to feed all the workers and still accumulate enough funds for the heavy They seized grain from the peasants without payment, and the peasants retaliated by going back to subsistence farming. Stalin responded by ordering forcible collectivisation. The peasants reacted to what they saw as an attack on their private property with acts of sabotage, such as ploughing in their crops, refusing to sow or harvest, slaughter of livestock (and sometimes of agricultural bureaucrats). The collec- TD Lysenko tivisation programme was forced through, but at great cost in lives and Meanwhile, investment in science was stepped up. As a result of their enthusiastic forecasts of the potential of genetics, the scientists were given the task of doubling agricultural productivity in 10 years. "Any critical comment, any silence that could be interpreted as criticism or mental reservation, became grounds for dismissal, or jailing or even shooting" (Joravsky). And when the scientists failed to meet the targets, the "bourgeois specialists" were blamed Practical achievements became the only acceptable test of scientific truth. It is not unreasonable to expect some practical applications to result from investment in science and technology, especially in a backward country with limited resources. But the bureaucracy expected miracles, and the penalties for not producing them were severe. T.D. Lysenko claimed to offer a miracle. He put forward a plan of action that would make obsolete all the theories, careful experiments and patience over several years offered by the scientists, at the right moment in history to get an echo in the bureaucracy. He is most well known "vernalisation"
for his notion of whereby winter wheat was wetted and chilled and then sown in spring. Winter wheat does not normally planted in spring. It is planted in winter, but if the winter is too severe it may be destroyed. In the winter of 1927-28, 5 million hectares of winter wheat were destroyed. The following winter saw the loss of 7m hectares. The masses starved. Lysenko claimed success for vernalisaton on the basis of a one-off experiment on his father's farm, but the bureaucracy were desperate and preferred to gamble on the new method than spend time on systematic trials.
Lysenko was immediately sent to the All-Union Institute of Plant Industry at Odessa, the most important centre of agricultural research, where he began other recipes for treatment before planting that would increase crop yields. He was an expert at organising publicity, had taken the measure of the bureaucratic mentality, and where traditional science was not yet able to solve the problems of Russian agriculture, his "practical" suggestions promised a lot for a little and right away. Lysenko was strongly opposed to the idea that his recipes needed to be tested. Where scientists did carry out trials he accused them of sabotage and wrecking if they failed to get good yields. In view of the very real sabotage that had greeted forcible collectivisation, it was not difficult to accept the idea of short cutting systematic trials in the context of the Russian soils and climate.
In Russia, soil, temperature and rainfall for wheat growing are marginal at best, and agriculture is subject to enormous uncertainty and variation. Droughts or frosts can wipe out a whole crop. In the first 11 years of the workers' state there were two years of drought, 1920 and 1921, and three years of severe winter cold, 1924, 1927 and 1928. North America's great plains and prairies are milder and wetter on average with less variation. (Even today Russia is America's largest grain customer).
Genetics attacked This wide variation in temperature and rainfall makes the American method of experimental plant breeding and evaluation, based on control experiments, statistical calculations and averaging over years and locations, unsatisfactory in Russia. Improved techniques for experimentation in Russia were thus needed in any case, and even without the bureaucratic deformation of the workers' state, it would have taken some time to establish that Lysenko's methods did not in fact lead to improved production.
Lysenko and his supporters increased their influence with the bureaucracy, orchestrating support on the basis of their "practical" approach and their attacks on the "bourgeois" scientists, especially the geneticists. In many cases it may not have been difficult to whip up hostility against "bourgeois" scientists: some of them undoubtedly were arrogant towards those from backgrounds who had trained after the
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revolution, never mind towards the idea that there was anything at all they could learn from ordinary workers and peasants with no scientific education at all. Lenin and Trotsky had won the support of many of the scientists by encouraging their work and a free interchange of ideas on science and other issues, and had begun to establish a degree of mutual respect between the "experts" and the "masses". bureaucracy exploited any resentments felt towards arrogant experts and turned it into a virtue-the elitist academy vs the exuberant communist youthin order to try and bolster their position. The Lysenkoists were also able to exploit the association between genetics (in fact a distortion of genetics) and eugenics, or the idea of breeding superior people. It was quite a common idea at the time-Russian eugenicists proposed breeding working class heroes. But it quickly became used to justify racist policies and propaganda by the Nazis, and Lysenko denounced genetics as racist. "Foreign' and "Cosmopolitan'
ideas were denounced, geneticists and other biologists began to lose their jobs were imprisoned or even "wreckers". Vavilov, the leading Russian geneticist was a supporter of the October revolution in 1917 and an enthusiastic propagandist for the potential of science under socialism, despite his background. He courageously defended his ideas and sentence was changed to life imprisonment but he died in prison, of malnutrition, in 1943.
As his organisational success grew, Lysenko developed theories out of veranswer to genetics. Vernalisation, he said, demonstrated the importance of environmental influences in heredity (as though classical genetic and evolutionary theory denied the importance of environment). Mendelian genetics was reactionary, racist and anti- Marxist. Genes were mystical notions, chromosomes under suspicion, and in extreme moments even plant hormones and viruses were "metaphysical vapourings of the bourgeois mind". It is true that there were some geneticists in the West who were religious, idealist, and had a mystical view of genes, but the claim that genetics was incompatible with dialectical materialism was essentially the result of the Lysenkoist vulgarisation of Marxism-and of science. For every aspect of genetics they claimed as contradicting dialectical materialism, there is in fact complete compatibility. For example, Lysenkoists said that, according to genetics, the gene is immutable and unchangeable: in fact the mutability and variation of genes is an Mendel was idealistic. On the contrary, he solved the problem of heredity by studying the actual (material) pattern of variation among the offspring of cross-bred plants. And this study led to a synthesis of two apparently contradictory elements, heredity and variaaspects of a single tion, as dual phenomenon: an example of dialectical Later on, the claims and theories grew wilder. Lysenko claimed that the environment could turn wheat weeds-the old peasant superstition elevated to theory. He modified natural selection: individual seedlings do not weaken each other by competing for nutrients, moisture and light, he said. They co-operate for the good of the community and weaker ones die out so the strong might thrive. He justified his theories by claiming they were compatible with Lamarck's theory of inheritance of acquired characters. Backwardness of Russian biology It was not wrong in principle to take "wild ideas''
peasant recipes or seriously. Ordinary people have an immense amount of knowledge, experience and useful ideas. And apparently "wild ideas" are as important in major scientific discoveries as patient, day to day experiment. The key thing is to separate the useful remedies from the superstition, magic and sheer habit, and to evaluate the "imaginative leaps" against some kind of observation or experimental evidence, free of the dogmatism and authoritarianism of bureaucracy.
In 1948, as the cold war was stepped up, genetics was formally banned in Russia. Until that time officially there had still been debate and discussion. After 1948 Lysenko had complete domination of biology, at least at an organisational and theoretical level. On the practical side, the campaigns for vernalisation had quietly been dropped and farmers had stopped using Lysenko's recipes. "The officials were preaching Lysenkoism while abandoning it in practice, just as American politicians used to preach the virtue of balanced budgets while moving ever deeper into deficit financing" (Joravsky). Lewontin and Levins, writing in The Radicalisation of Science (ed. H & S Rose), argued that 1948-62, the of Lysenkoist hegemony in responds to the period of most rapid growth in yields per acre", suggesting that Lysenkoism had some justification in agricultural practice after all. their comparison of US and Russian yields are all made relative to 1926-8 figures, which in Russia (but America) included the catastrophic crop failure of 1927-8, so any normal year's crop would be relative to that. Second, the period of increasing yields did not begin until after vernalisation had been abandon ed in practice.
The fate of Lysenkoism was tied to the fate of Stalinism. After Stalin's inherited Lysenkoism. As the crisis in the bureaucracy developed, increasing proof of Lysenko's self-deception deliberate fraud emerged. Meanwhile in the West, the discovery of the structure of DNA, the cracking of genetic code and the establishment of mechanisms of protein synthesis in the early 1960s, revealed, not just to the world scientific community but to the general public, the grotesque backwardness of Soviet biology. Khrushchev and Lysenko were sacked within 3 months of each other. Lysenkoism had its roots in peasant superstition and ancient recipes and was seized upon as seeming to offer a short cut in a period of agricultural catastrophe, when the science of the experts had not been able to offer a quick solution. It coincided with the bureaucratic deformation of the workers' state, and was taken up and sustained by the authoritarianism and dogmatism of the bureaucracy. After that it developed its own logic and momentum independent of its ability to provide coherent scientific explana tions of natural phenomena, or even practical applications in agriculture, but totally bound up with the development and crisis of the bureaucracy. In advanced capitalist countries the largest amount of research development work is done by private industry in its own interests. Its primary aim is new products and processes which will lead to more profit. The overwhelming majority of Government sponsored research, meanwhile, goes on defence and areospace projects with only a relatively small amount being spent on health, welfare or public transport. Clearly, priorities of a socialist system will be entirely different, and the major goal of research and development will be the satisfaction of human needs. Does this mean that "Marxist"
science will be The experience of capitalist priorities has shown that some sciences are highly developed where some barely exist, as a result of the interests of big business. Thus for example, the
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Backward Russian agriculture was further retarded by the adoption of Lysenko's 'theorias'. chemistry of organo-chlorine and organo-phosphorus compounds is quite sophisticated, together with techniques of analytical chemistry and chromatogaphy, because the chemical industry had a lot of money to make out of chemical pesticides like DDT. On the other hand, the biological effects of chemicals on humans and other animals, the interaction of living things and the environment, and the biological control of pests were for many years at all. So the exhardly developed istence or otherwise of a branch of science depends decisively on the interests of the society concerned. But does society affect the nature, as well as the existence, of theories and facts? Are there objective facts, neutral in class terms, only used or misused by a particular society? It is obviously silly to suggest that, for example, water will no longer boil at 100°C under socialism. Nevertheless, scientists and technologists, like other people, are members of a particular society at a particular moment in history. They cannot help being influenced by the prejudices, outlook and ideology of that society - consciously or unconsciously. This is bound to affect the way they look at things, including their work. Newton couldn't care less about the needs of the emerging mercantile capitalists, but the fact that navigation, mining and ballistics were increasingly important meant that problems such as what laws governed the motion of planets or cannon balls, became common currency and so posinteresting problems for a ed Even the mathematician to solve.
selection of which facts are important, what measurements to make, and other important details of experimental research, involve value judgements which in turn will be influenced by 'social values. To this extent, even the ther Readi Theories of evolution and genetics Engels-The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man...
Johanson-Lucy: beginnings of humankind.
Asimov-Guide to Science, Volume Two, The biological sciences.
Gould — Ever since Darwin.
Gould - Hens teeth and horses toes Gould- Mismeasure of man.
Gould-Panda's Thumb .
Rose - Not in our genes.
Rose-Chemistry of Life.
Connor-Evolution Vs Creationism. 34 'facts" are not entirely independent of society and its ideology. Certainly theories-conceptions and explanations of these facts - are influenced by the ideas and outlook of society, as Galileo, Darwin and Einstein found when they challenged the accepted theories of the time.
Marxism and Science That by no means implies that socialism will overthrow all the ad vances of science made under capitalism, together with capitalism itself. On the contrary, the Bolsheviks quite rightly pledged, on many occsions, to make the findings of world science a foundation of socialism. Socialism will make it possible for there to be an interaction between the practical experience of workers and the "experts" as scientific expertise of well as making available time for scientific study and research to workers who wish to use it, so that eventually the distinction between experts and everyone else will wither away. John Pickard-An appraisal of Engels' theory of human development, in Militant International Review, No 26, Summer 1984, 75p.
.. 15p £3.95 £4.50 £3.95 £4.95 £3.95 £3.95 £3.95 £3.95 payable to World Socialist Books. ..60p The case of Lysenko does not demonstrate, as bourgeois writers would have us believe, the disastrous consequences of allowing Marxism to influence science. Engels' theory of the development of the brain as a consequence and not a cause of human beings' standing upright and using tools, was based entirely on a dialectical materialist analysis, since the evidence that confirmed it, and disproved the opposite theory of most of the scientific "experts", , was not found until years later (see J. Pickard's article, An appraisal of Engels theory of human development in MIR No 26, Summer 1984).
Lysenkoism only demonstrates the disastrous consequences — for biology, for biologists and for agriculture - of a stalinist vulgarisation of Marxism and of science, backed up by the apparatus of a police state.
In a socialist democracy, it will be possible to test out the ways in which the knowledge, ideas and methods of Marxism and science might enrich each other. Urder trom vorid Socialist books, 3/13 Hepscott Road, London E9 5HB. Add 25 per cent for postage on orders under £5, 10 per cent under £10, over £10 post free. Cheques