Dialectical materialism and Soviet science in the 1920s and 1930s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the Bolshevik coup in October 1917 and victory in the Civil War four years later, the philosophy underlying Marxism, dialectical materialism, became a cultural resource – not just a philosophy, but also a ruling ideology and language of accommodation to the regime's policies and priorities. State officials, political figures, ideologues, philosophers and scientists all drew upon this cultural resource to pursue their ends – to seek truth, to display loyalty to the regime, to struggle for resources, power or survival. Dialectical materialism itself became a terrain of contention and was constantly redefined as it was incorporated into Soviet culture in the 1920s and 1930s. A non-reductionist materialism that emphasises unceasing historical development and the interplay and mutual transformation of opposites, dialectical materialism provided numerous interpretative moments to those employing it as a philosophy and ample flexibility to those deploying it as a language of struggle, justification and accommodation. Being and consciousness, base and superstructure, material continuity and dialectical discontinuity, necessity and freedom, analysis and synthesis, theory and practice, philosophy and science – all these relationships could be interpreted and deployed in various ways. It is difficult, therefore, to imagine any scientific discovery or line of investigation that would be acceptable in terms of the dominant philosophy in western science – positivism – that could not be interpreted or justified using the lexicon of dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism proved notoriously amenable to varied usages, including penetrating (but often sharply differing) analyses and the justification of the morally unjustifiable.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.064 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".