December 2024
Lynn Walsh, the editor of this book, passed away this year, aged 79.
Lynn was, in fact, more than the editor of this book. Lynn had a strikingly profound understanding of science and dialectics and his influence on the ideas expressed in this book cannot be understated.
Lynn was never a rigid or dogmatic thinker. He excoriated my early naive view that science simply develops according to discovered ‘facts’. No, he told me, the progress of science could only be understood through the Marxist, historical materialist method. Each new discovery is viewed through the distorting prism of the discoveries of previous generations and usually interpreted according to the dominant concepts, the preconceptions of the epoch, whether knowingly or unknowingly.[1]
Results that defy our comprehension are generally pushed into a known formulation, even when the data militates against it. There is a formidable push back against revolutionary new ideas. Such a revolutionary new idea was the Big bang theory.
The Big bang
That discussion took place in 1992. It was formative for me. The result was Ripples in the Universe published in Militant International Review, (now Socialism Today) under Lynn’s editorship, in Autumn 1992 – my first attempt, in collaboration with Lynn, to discuss the Big Bang origins of the universe, after big news had hit the headlines.[2]
As we shall see in this book, the Big Bang theory was a dynamic alternative theory to the then widely accepted view, dating back to Issac Newton, that stars and galaxies simply spread out over an infinity of space, and always had since the moment Newton’s God created the world an infinity of time ago.[3] The Big Bang proposes that the observed expansion of space, if run backwards, points conclusively to a very small, highly dense origin which explosively expanded in a “Big Bang”, some 13.8 billion years ago, to become the universe we now see.
In April 1992, NASA, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had just announced the first results from a satellite called Cobe, which made very precise measurements of the radiation that cosmologists interpret as a relic of the initial Big Bang. I was excited to get a discussion going within the forerunner of the Socialist Party, then called Militant Labour, about this revolutionary new cosmological concept.
NASA had provided the first evidence which met the criterion of precision that scientists strove for – it was the ‘smoking gun’ evidence of the Big Bang. The Times quoted a very excited Steven Hawking, the world renowned cosmologist, claiming that this was the “discovery of the century, if not of all time.” [4] Possibly a slight exaggeration! The discovery was a turning point for the theory, bringing it wider acceptance in the scientific community, if not the general population.
The philosophy of Dialectics
The Big bang was a veritable revolution not just in physics, but our entire perception of our place in the universe. The universe was now no longer a fixed, unchanging thing, infinite in space and time. There was no longer a justification for the unimaginative duplication of the stars we see through telescopes, projected back into the past, forward into the future and through an assumed infinity of space. Instead, a there was a violent beginning in the past and a slow extinction in the distant but measurable future.
In the 1990s, it was hard to swallow. It was met with incomprehension and ridicule. Even the very term “Big Bang” was coined to mock the ideas. Its adherents adopted the name. But the Big Bang could be understood more easily through the guidance of the method of Marxism.
Lynn also had a profound view of the Marxist philosophy of dialectics. Once, when I attempted to begin a discussion on Engels’ well-known three laws of dialectics, discussed in this book, Lynn astonished me: “Lenin described 16 ‘laws’, not three”. They were not laws in the sense of fixed, scientific laws, he explained. They are a guide to understanding. This book attempts to show how these ‘laws’ can be easily understood when properly presented.
Lenin also states, after enumerating his 16 “laws”, that dialectics can be summed up as the doctrine of the unity of opposites but immediately adds: “but it requires explanations and development”.[5] Engels called this same concept the “interpenetration of opposites” which appears at first sight to be an equally obscure – if not a rather more frightening – expression.
Opposites in Science
And yet, when we consider the matter, we do indeed find opposites in anything large or small (any “unity”) which can undergo change. Atoms (the “unity”) contain electrons and protons which carry opposite charges. That apparently harmonious workplace you work in, is actually a seething battle over wages, conditions, and any number of other things. That country you live in, which looks so peaceful taken as a whole, contains a working class which produces the wealth, which is brutally exploited by the capitalist class, which in turn owns the wealth produced. A revolutionary change is slowing boiling up.
This is the sense, in Lynn’s view, in which the word “opposites” is meant to be understood within anything under consideration. A body of any kind, which might on the surface look like a harmonious whole – a happy workplace! – has within it contradictory elements. This view is developed in this book, especially in relation to the development of science and the Big Bang theory in particular.
Lynn explained how science is just such a ‘unity’ of interpenetrating ‘opposites’. Despite reaching a consensus viewpoint on topics, science thrives in a world of opposing theories, always challenging the status quo. In this turmoil, from time to time, the old ‘unity’ – the consensus view – bursts asunder in a revolution of new higher level of understanding, as old theories are overturned by opposing ones. Quantity turns to quality. The Big Bang was such a revolution.
The results of more than a decade of discussion and investigation with Lynn form the book, ‘Science, Marxism and the Big Bang’, which Lynn not only guided and edited, but even provided the opening paragraph, which, typical of his thinking, warns against dogmatism: “Marxism does not provide a ready-made key for making judgements about scientific ideas. It cannot substitute for a detailed knowledge of the appropriate scientific material.” But what the dialectics of Marxism does do, is provide a framework for understanding what science is and how it operates.
Epoch making events
As I write (December 2024), the South Korean working class have faced down an announcement by the President that he is imposing martial law. They declared a general strike within hours of the announcement. This sudden explosion of militancy, which is powerful because an all-out general strike threatens the very existence of capitalism, shows that under the surface of what the President may have thought was a peaceful, harmonious society, was a seething anger against the political elite, a society where the opposites of the ruling capitalist class and the working class are in a constant battle, although it takes many forms, often hidden from view and disguised within pure;y political struggles.
It would be wrong to give the impression that Lynn Walsh was mainly focused on philosophy and science. On the contrary, he was a leading force in the development of first the Militant tendency and then the Socialist Party , and the international organization, the Committee for a Workers International or CWI for short, to which they are affiliated.
(See https://www.socialistworld.net/.) He travelled the world, visiting countries that were in revolutionary turmoil, from the 1974 revolution in Portugal to the collapsing USSR. International events like those in South Korea now were his bread and butter.
Lynn was an important contributor to the major debates we had nationally and internationally. He propounded, in many articles and documents, during debates within our party, the revolutionary new ideas that the party was developing. These included debates around such epoch-making events as the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1989-1992 period, and the final collapse of the UK’s Labour party, and any number of other so-called ‘Left’ parties around the world, into the malicious embrace of the capitalist class, at around the same time, which required of socialists a complete reorientation.
In these latter two debates in particular, opposition arose from the very same figures against whom we argue in Science, Marxism and the Big Bang. The website marxist.net has placed those historical documents on its archives.
As the millennium turned, Lynn increasingly focused on the financial tools the capitalist class were using to leverage a speculative boom. His articles in Socialism Today predicted the worldwide financial collapse – the 2007–2008 global financial crisis which was the most severe worldwide economic crisis since the 1929 Wall Street crash. [6]
A careful examination of articles published in the run up to this event will demonstrate that no other party on the so-called left, or the far left, anticipated this world-shaking event. Instead, they bought into the capitalist propaganda. The Socialist Party stood alone in its warnings, while capitalist commentators and economists were almost unanimous in announcing that an increasingly unregulated free-market capitalism, unhindered by state intervention, no longer frightened by the collapsed Soviet Union, had ushered in a new world order which would be the ‘end of history’. Then the wheels fell off.
Lynn Walsh’s insights into the workings of the world were many and various. May he rest in peace.
* * *
This edition has expanded and refined explanations of the historical development of scientific ideas here and there, but I’ve left the modern scientific statements unaltered. Undoubtedly, as this book itself asserts, new interpretations of data and new revelations will continue. The way that the universe as a whole is variously described in popular scientific discourse has continued to develop. But the ‘ four pillars’ of the Big Bang theory[7] defended in this book, remain robust.
It has been almost 20 years since this short book came out. There has never been a refutation issued by our adversaries. Supporters of Alan Woods sometimes say that while the facts in Reason in Revolt, the book which Science, Marxism and the Big Bang takes issue with, may be mistaken, the method he outlines is correct. This book shows that the method is in fact wrong. Indeed, one might pause to wonder how a method can be correct if its application leads to errors almost on every page, some, as the introduction shows, quite fundamental.
How did the method of Marxism, which finds the revolutionary core in the seemingly passive exterior of all things, lead Woods to dismiss the revolutionary new theory of the Big Bang and endorse the centuries-old existing Newtonian theory, based on his belief in an infinite God? Only if that method was turned on its head, into its opposite. Reason in Revolt places human reasoning, or philosophical insights, above any serious consideration of the data. It is the opposite of a materialist approach.
So let us repeat Lynn’s warning once again: Marxism does not provide a ready-made key for making judgements about scientific ideas. It cannot substitute for a detailed knowledge of the appropriate scientific material. As Lynn taught me decades ago, Lenin ridiculed attempts by his comrades to make a “Marxist” judgement of scientific ideas. Lenin called it “Communist swagger”.[8]
[1] This is discussed in detail in the final chapter.
[2] Science Forum: Ripples in the Universe, by Pete Mason, Militant International Review, Autumn 1992, issue 49, pp. 26-29
[3] Newton argues for infinite space thus: “Since every particle of space is always, and every indivisible moment of duration is every where, certainly the Maker and Lord of all things cannot be never and no where.” (Newton, Principia, book three, General Scholium, p1,158). See section on Newton in this book.
[4] Nigel Hawkes, ‘Hunt On for Dark Secret of Universe’, London Times, 25 April, 1992
[5] Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Summary of Dialectics, 1914, Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 38, pp. 220-222
[6] See ‘Capitalism Unleashed’, Lynn Walsh, Socialism Today, November 2006; ‘Is the US Economy heading for recession?’ Lynn Walsh, Socialism Today, December 2006; ‘Forever blowing bubbles? What is happening to the world economy?’ Lynn Walsh, Socialism Today, May 2007; and an overview: ‘10 years since the financial crash – the socialist answer to capitalist crisis’, Steve Score, The Socialist, 12/09/2018
[7] See the chapter, The Big Bang and mysticism in science
[8] Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life, p274. See Chapter: ‘The dialectic of the unity and interpenetration of opposites in science’ in this book for a discussion of this.