Robert M. Young Online Writings
'Science Is a Labour Process' 66k.
This paper (which was somewhat shortened by the journal's editor from the spoken version) was presented at a British Society for Social Responsibility in Science conference on 'Science Under Capitalism'. I spoke for the Radical Science Journal Collective to an audience of workerists, Trotskyists and anti-intellectuals and defended value of the theoretical work of the RSJ group for a practical politics of science. The paper also contains a succinct version of the labour process perspective which we were developing at that time in collaboration with the Conference of Socialist Economists, a widely-based group of marxist social scientists with which we were encouraging radical scientists to collaborate in an effort to transcend the assumed special status of science and the isolation of scientific workers from a broader political and theoretical perspective. The paper is somewhat defensive, but I think it puts its position clearly. The article was published in Science for People Nos. 43/44:31-37, 1979.