Daniel Welsh

Semanticists and Russia

Lysenkoism Breeds Second Thoughts in the Movement

From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 25, 19 June 1950, p. 6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

One of the interesting characteristics of the Russian official mind is its virtually complete disregard for world public opinion, particularly among those intellectual circles which are frequently attracted to Stalinist causes and front groups in Western Europe and America. By carrying out systematic purges against “foreign” tendencies, the regime continually alienates fellow travelers who are not too interested in the political and social crimes of Stalinism but who react negatively against accepting Stalin’s pronouncements as the ultimate in omniscience.

Some of the sidelights of the recent “discussion” among Russian biologists exemplify this. This discussion was of a type long familiar to victims of Stalinist argumentation and neither better nor worse than previous ones. The biological controversy, however, marked the first time that the party had seriously interfered in the natural sciences to the extent of making a certain scientific theory official state doctrine and proscribing all others as counter-revolutionary. Needless to say, such an attitude has nothing in common with the Marxist view of the role of science, nor with the practices of the Russian Revolution under Lenin.

The outcome of the controversy has been to elevate from obscurity the teachings of the Russian plant-breeder T.D. Lysenko and make them unassailable. The imposition of Lysenko’s views on the whole of Russian science has served considerably to lower the latter’s reputation in the eyes of non-political scientists in the capitalist countries. Some have utilized the opportunity to break their perhaps embarrassing ties with Russian scientific societies and journals. Others, less inhibited, have used, this event to demonstrate “scientifically” that free science is incompatible with “socialism,” that is, Stalinism.

Tended Toward Pro-Russian View

A more interesting development came to light in a recent issue of ETC, the official organ of the International Society for General Semantics.

General semantics, for those unfamiliar with this journal, may be briefly summarized as a doctrine designed to further scientific thinking about problems. This is combined with an emphasis on the correct use of language for the communication of meaning. Apart from the claims they make for their method, general semanticists have frequently succeeded in making quite interesting analyses of social doctrines and documents. For example, ETC’s review of the President’s Civil Rights Report of 1948 was a masterful expose of the commission’s whitewashing of Truman’s responsibility for Jim (Crow in the administrative apparatus. We are not here concerned with a general critique of the political ideas of semanticism, except to note that for people who claim to think scientifically, semanticists have always had difficulty in arriving at a very accurate picture of Stalinism. It would certainly not be correct to say that ETC was ever a Stalinist organ or the ISFGS a Stalinist front group, but the attitude of some prominent semanticists has certainly been equivocal.

S.I. Hayakawa, editor of ETC, has been a featured speaker at meetings of the Progressive Party. And two years ago the associate editor, Anatol Rapoport, wrote a critique of dialectical materialism in which he identified Stalinism with Marxism, crediting the former with the Russian Revolution and “a well-organized working class in the Continental countries which may still be able to resist the coming wave of reaction.”

It was clear from this and other statements that Rapoport certainly did not look with any particular disfavor on Stalinism, in spite of the fact that he took dialectical materialism severely to task for insisting that “the principal theme of history has been and is a class struggle,” and criticized Lenin for “misunderstanding” Marx, the intellectual grandfather of general semantics.

Lysenkoism Opens His Eyes

It took the “Lysenko controversy” to open the eyes of semanticist Rapoport to the defects of Stalinism, although to be perfectly fair he had indicated an awareness in his previous article of the existence of certain deficiencies in Russian life. In the Winter 1950 issue of ETC he contributes a lengthy review of Conway Zirble’s Death of a Science in Russia, a collection of articles, speeches, etc., written while the discussion was in progress. He summarizes his conclusions as follows: Russian scientists “have decided (or were forced) to abandon the basic tenets of rational evaluation on which scientific method rests – open-mindedness, objectivity and the critical attitude.”

It is not the outcome of the discussion which causes this harsh judgment, it is the manner in which it was carried out. Rapoport cites some of the characteristics of Stalinist argumentation which have now entered the field of scientific discussion.

“Soviet biologists indulge in labeling proudly, profusely and recklessly and take all the intellectually disastrous consequences of such behavior ... This preoccupation with labels seems a natural consequence of an obsession to discredit rather than refute an opponent.”
The thing which quite rightly horrifies Rapoport the scientist is that “not a single report of a single controlled experiment was produced at the conference of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Science to shed light on the question presumably under discussion ...” Instead, it appears, Lysenko exhibited a tomato plant bearing both red and yellow fruit and claimed that this was evidence for the hereditary transmission of acquired characteristics.

Anti-Stalinists Will Recognize This

Next mentioned is the Stalinist penchant for citing questions from accepted authorities “whether the quotations have any bearing on the subject or not.” (Emphasis Rapoport’s.) Needless to say, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin figure prominently as authorities. Rapoport does a good job of ridiculing the practice of using Engel’s arguments against Malthus to lend support to Lysenko’s doctrine.
Rapoport proceeds to dissect the manner in which emotional labels such as “saboteur” are invoked against opponents of Lysenko. Since the truth of Lysenko’s doctrines would presumably increase by vast amounts the productivity of Russian agriculture, to oppose Lysenko is equated with opposing the expansion of agriculture. This is next in line with –
Discrediting and disabling opponents by appeals to charges of immorality. In order to refute an opponent who had studied the effects of a war-ravished environment on the process of natural selection, Lysenko charged him with social irresponsibility “implying that during the great cataclysm of war Professor Dubinin could be so indifferent to the emergency as to spend his time worrying about how the war affected the hereditary mechanism of fruit flies.”
Finally, Rapoport mentions that administrative measures of one kind or another appear to have been taken against scientific opponents of Lysenko’s doctrine.

Political opponents of Stalinism will readily recognize the practices which Rapoport cites with such indignation as characteristic of Stalinism everywhere. Such a statement might appear to Professor Rapoport as an “unjustified generalization,” yet trade unionists and others who have come into contact with them know that Stalinists are at all times prepared to resort to slander, misrepresentation, etc., in order to carry their viewpoint.

While Rapoport indicates some knowledge that “after the purges of 1937–38, virtually all free discussion of political matters ceased (at least in public),” he has not up to now considered this of sufficient importance to outweigh attempts to “bring about greater understanding” between Stalinism and capitalism. Indeed, in his previous article, he considered it desirable that the two systems continue to live side by side, and sought to accomplish this by “strengthening communication.” It is obvious that it is this basic acceptance of the desirability of the status quo which allowed semanticists like Rapoport and Hayakawa to accept the political role of Stalinist fellow traveler, at least in its Wallaceite version.

“Semantic Cretinism”?

The Lysenko affair has served to prove to Rapoport that there is not much hope left for Russia. “The last hope of intellectual understanding with Russia, on the basis of objective, clearheaded rationality of science, is vanishing.” Yet the conclusion which he draws is that “we may still try to establish communication with the non-Soviet Communist world,” by which he means Stalinist China. It would seem that this is a case of what semanticists would call “not recognizing the proper delineations of propositions.” Others might call it a case of “semantic cretinism.”

We feel that there must be basic inadequacies in a theory which can be so wrong about the content of Stalinism. Yet in general semanticists, because they do believe in the rational procedures of science, have shown a willingness to discuss with others and subject their own ideas to criticism. More than that, they have shown themselves to be opposed to all political and social developments which tend to hamper the free development of scientific and political ideas. As such they can be real help in the fight for academic freedom and civil rights.

Insofar as Rapoport is representative of semanticists, he has shown that he can learn about Stalinism. It may be significant that the same issue which carried his recent article also pokes fun at the Stalinist Civil Rights Conference in New York for voting down a resolution calling for presidential pardon to the 18 defendants in the Minneapolis case. For their part, socialists owe to general semantics a more thorough treatment of the latter’s viewpoint than they have yet undertaken.

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