REVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE FOR RADICAL TIMES: TOWARDS A PRAXIS OF RESISTANCE AND LIBERATION
We believe in truth and that it can be discovered, if only partially. We believe that knowledge is praxis and that praxis joins theory with collective agency in the struggle for human emancipation. We believe in peace, social justice and the emancipatory strivings of humanity; and that the struggle to liberate ourselves from the scourges of imperialism, poverty and exploitation will only be realized as a result of the revolutionary transformation of human social and economic relationships. We believe that science can be a revolutionary instrument of liberation; and that this moment in the human time space continuum contains both enormous danger and great potentialities. More than anything, we believe people must act. However, our activity must be guided by knowledge.
Science is a mode of discovering knowledge of the human and natural universes. At the same time, when linked to Poetry and Art, creating a new and radical interdisciplinarity, it prefigures an imaginary of a different world and a radically reconfigured humanity. As such it demands a revolutionary rupture with old and dying habits and ethics of injustice. A revolutionary science is part and parcel of radical processes of humanity becoming conscious of itself in order to liberate itself.
The US ruling elite has brought the world near the reality of global war and thermonuclear war with Russia and/or China. The economic recession continues even as the neoliberal economy looks to survive on another bubble, only for it to eventually burst. Poverty, unemployment, the social/geographic dislocation of hundreds of millions of people, mass imprisonment, and imperialist sponsored terrorism and general misery haunt the human landscape. White supremacy and class /economic exploitation make super profits and the concentration of society’s wealth in a few hands, rather than human values, the engine driving advanced capitalist nations and the global neoliberal order. Irreversible climate change is fast becoming a threat to humanity itself. Billions of children on our planet suffer the most.
In the face of this enormous and historic crisis billions of people are rising up, saying No to the global ruling elites. From India, South Africa, Yemen, Palestine, Syria and Haiti, to Greece, Spain and Britain; from the Philippines to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chile and Venezuela, and indeed in the United States itself, a global consensus has taken shape for freedom and against enslavement to the oligarchs and the billionaire class. People are demanding an end to plutocracies, authoritarianism, oppressive hierarchies and oligarchies, calling for people’s democracy. In place of the state controlled by the billionaires and war makers they are demanding democratic states of all the people.
As people rise they cry out for science, knowledge, poetry and art. They increasingly reject corporate and commodified science and art. They demand science and knowledge of, by and for the people. Science and art, poetry and music are sites of political and ideological resistance; as people fight to take back their creations to be used for their liberation. The control of knowledge and information by corporate elites is being fiercely challenged. Academic institutions, the neoliberal university and think tanks are being rejected as people create new institutions of science and knowledge production. Music from and of the people, dedicated to struggle and liberation, emerges from the ruin and habits of corporate commodified culture.
In these times, a new politic of the people is needed; a politic grounded in radical theory and ideology. Out of these milieu a new vanguard of the people must come; as well a new global counter hegemonic historic bloc. That is the mission of and the commitment of the symposium, “Revolutionary Science for Radical Times: Engaging Logics, Knowledge and Action”. It is part of and anchored to the global uprising and resistance of the people. It is part of the world transformative trajectories of peoples’ radical actions.
Our aim is to launch a theoretical and ideological discussion of modes of knowing the world in order to change it. We ground our praxis in three revolutionary impulses: The Black Radical Tradition, the radical wing of the European Enlightenment and the continuing Revolutionary significance of Anti-Colonial Struggles. We include among these impulses the Haitian, French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban Revolutions. Our praxis seeks out the revolutionary possibilities of all science and all fields of knowledge including concepts of time, relativity and probability, new geometries, dialectical materialist historiographies and sociologies, womanist and liberation theologies, pedagogies of the oppressed and the new logics flowing from the many sciences of complexity which seek to discover patterns of emergence. The complexity of reality demands a complex understanding of science and knowledge and their inevitable connection to practices of human freedom.
We in the Unites States are situated in the heart of empire. This puts on us an extraordinary responsibility to be in solidarity with the peoples of the world. We believe humanity has reached a moment of truth, indeed of revolutionary transformation. We wish to contribute to that transformation and help bring into existence a new vanguard of the people, broadly understood.
We hope from the symposium will come the beginnings of intellectual, artistic and scientific processes that will lead ultimately to a new revolutionary imaginary. We seek to discover from within the jangling threads of global movements and protests a singularity of purpose that unites us; and to discover what unifies the people in an intercivilizational and complex world.
We acknowledge that humanity is the agent of change. And that science, logic, and art equip humanity to be its own liberators. We believe that if ours and millions of other similar efforts around the world are successful, in the not that distant future, we can realize a harvest of peace and justice for the world.
