Atom and Barbarism: The Degradation of Science in the Age of Capitalist Commodification
From Hiroshima to Imperialist Wars: Class Struggle and the Dialectic of Capitalist Instrumental Reason
Young Comrades,
History is not, as the ruling classes write it, a matter of the wills of heroes, of abstract moral preferences, or of accidents. History is the hard and dialectical flow of material production, of class struggles, and of crises of capital accumulation. Every year when 6 August arrives, the bourgeois media, the academy, and liberal pacifists fill the screens. They tell us an agitated human tragedy; they shed tears and say "Never again." Yet none of these same circles asks this plain question: The hand that dropped those bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—whose hand was it, of which relations of production, of which economic system?
One of the greatest illusions of bourgeois ideology is to present science and technology as "supra-class, neutral, and abstract progress." Yet the dialectical-materialist examination of history shows us that no technological instrument is independent of the mode of production in which it is born and of the interests of the ruling class. The splitting of the atom was a revolutionary step of physics; but when that atom fell into the midst of capitalist relations of production and imperialist rivalry, it turned not into a "source of life" but into the most barbaric weapon of mass destruction history has seen.
Our aim in this text is to tear away the dazzling veil of bourgeois humanism and to grasp, in all its nakedness, the historical and material conditions that gave birth to the atomic bomb.
| Issue | Bourgeois / Idealist Approach | Dialectical-Materialist Approach |
|---|---|---|
| 6 August 1945 | "A tragic but necessary decision taken to end the war quickly and save soldiers." | "An imperialist crime committed to intimidate the Soviet Union and establish post-war global US hegemony." |
| Science and Technology | "Humanity's common, neutral development line that always moves forward." | "An instrument that serves the class interests of whichever class holds it; under capitalism, one that turns into a 'force of destruction.'" |
| The Source of War | "The tendency to violence in human nature, greed, or the madness of dictators." | "A class phenomenon born of private property, crises of capital accumulation, and the necessity of repartitioning markets." |
| Solution | "Abstract calls for peace, international treaties, and moral sermons." | "To abolish the capitalist/imperialist system that produces war and to socialize the means of production." |
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in The German Ideology, draw attention to a vital dialectical law: when capitalist relations of production reach a certain level of development, the productive forces that carry society forward turn into forces of destruction. The splitting of the atom is the most concrete proof of this law. A technology that carried the potential to understand nature and produce unlimited energy, once it entered the yoke of market struggles and monopolistic competition, evolved into a barbarism that caused more than 200,000 people to vaporize in seconds. Hiroshima is not humanity's defeat by technique; it is the defeat of humanity and of technique by capital.
The Material Basis of War and the Birth of War Culture
The ideological refuge the ruling classes love most is the fairy tale of "human nature." Whenever we speak of a massacre or a weapon of mass destruction, the same rote answer is immediately thrown at us: "Human beings are by nature selfish, aggressive, and inclined to war." This claim aims to dump the historical crimes of the ruling class onto humanity and to make the existing order of exploitation eternal and everlasting.
Dialectical materialism teaches us that there is no unchanging, abstract "human nature." The human being is the ensemble of social relations. What determines human behavior and the relation to violence is the material mode of production and the property relations of the society in which one lives. Violence and conflict are not a genetic coding; they are a historical product of class societies, of private property, and of the mechanisms of appropriating surplus product.
As Friedrich Engels set out in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in the Primitive Communal Society stage that constitutes the overwhelming majority of human history, there was no institutionalized "war." There were occasional conflicts between tribes; yet these conflicts neither rested on a systematic aim of annihilation nor had behind them the desire of one class to subjugate another. For property was common and there was no class differentiation.
War's becoming an "institution" began with the development of the means of production and the passage of land and animals into private property. When the value produced exceeded society's own consumption (surplus product), the drive to appropriate the value produced by others was born. Captured enemies were no longer killed; they were enslaved and made part of production. The development of the means of production triggered the accumulation of surplus product; this accumulation triggered private property and class formation; and class formation triggered war's becoming an institution. Thus war became, for the ruling classes, a "method of acquiring means of production."
The material basis of war is private property; yet no ruling class can drive its slaves to war by saying "Go and die to raise our profit rates!" Here the institutions of the ideological superstructure enter the scene. As Marx expressed it, the ruling ideas of every age are the ideas of the ruling class. War culture is the art of presenting the economic interests of the ruling class to the oppressed classes as "society's common interest."
| War's Real Material Cause (Base) | Ideological Illusion Produced by the Ruling Class (Superstructure) |
|---|---|
| Seizing land, mines, and markets | "Sacred defense of the homeland, national honor and glory" |
| Controlling trade routes and capital flows | "Bringing civilization, spreading democracy and freedom" |
| Exporting internal class contradictions outward | "National cohesion and spirit of unity against external enemies" |
| Destroying the capital accumulation of rival bourgeoisie | "Conflict of race, religion, sect, or culture" |
War culture is built by creating mass hysterias, by enemy-izing the other, and by pumping chauvinism. While "martyrdom" literature is sold to the children of the working class, the bourgeoisie that starts the war calculates the new market shares born from the balance sheet of this destruction. Carl von Clausewitz's determination that "War is the continuation of politics by other means" gains meaning with the materialist foundation Lenin added: Politics is the concentrated expression of economics. Therefore war is the pursuit of the economic interests of the ruling classes by means of violence.
From the simple tools of primitive societies to modern missiles, the change in the character of war parallels not so much technical development as the scale and greed of capital's accumulation. The most degraded point war culture has reached is the complete technicalization of violence. The instrumental reason capitalism has attained has turned wiping a city from the map at the push of a button, from thousands of meters up, into a cold-blooded statistic.
The Main Cause of the World Wars: Imperialism and Crises
Bourgeois economists try to palm capitalism off on us as "a rational market in which free individuals trade freely." Yet dialectical logic shows us contradiction in motion: Free competition gives birth to its own dialectical opposite. By the merciless laws of competition, strong capital swallows the weak. Production and capital concentrate increasingly in the hands of fewer and fewer giant companies. By the end of the nineteenth century, free-competitive capitalism had evolved into the imperialist stage, dominated by finance capital and monopolies born of the marriage of industrial capital and bank capital.
As V. I. Lenin analyzed in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, at this stage the system's internal contradictions spill beyond national borders. Now it is not only the export of commodities but above all the export of capital that becomes decisive. Yet the world's land is finite. Once the monopolies have partitioned the world among themselves, only one path remains for opening new channels of capital accumulation: to repartition the world.
| Historical Fact | Bourgeois Idealist Illusion | Dialectical-Materialist Reality |
|---|---|---|
| World War I | "Diplomatic crises that began with a Serbian nationalist's bullet." | "The struggle of the German bourgeoisie, which completed its industrialization late, to seize by force the markets in the hands of British and French imperialism." |
| World War II | "The Allies' moral struggle against fascism in the name of human rights." | "The capital-accumulation crisis blocked by the Great Depression of 1929 turning into a conflict over repartitioning the world." |
The German monopoly bourgeoisie, which built its industry late but grew rapidly, set out to repartition the world by bayonet. In World War II, by contrast, the bourgeois "democracies" targeted fascism not because it was a "crime against humanity," but because German and Japanese finance capital posed a direct threat to their own colonial networks. Fascism is a monster grown by the bourgeoisie itself in moments of capitalist crisis—to crush the working class and to secure colonial expansion abroad.
One of the most fundamental laws Karl Marx set out in Capital is the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall. In the capitalist mode of production, competition continually pushes bosses to invest in technology. While constant capital (machines, factories) grows, variable capital (living labor of workers) relatively declines. Yet the sole source of profit is the surplus value expropriated from living labor. As the share of living labor in total capital declines, the system's general rate of profit tends to fall. This leads capitalism inevitably to produce Crises of Overaccumulation of Capital.
It is precisely at this point that the most savage mechanism capitalism resorts to in order to resolve its crises enters the scene: the Physical Destruction of Capital. As Marx noted, to resolve its crises capitalism forcibly destroys on the one hand vast quantities of productive power, and on the other seizes new markets. War, from the standpoint of the capitalist system, is a vast clearing operation:
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Accumulated excess constant capital that brings no profit (factories, buildings, goods in stock) is physically annihilated by bombs.
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Living labor (millions of workers and peasants) is destroyed on the fronts, balancing unemployment.
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The "reconstruction" of ruined countries opens trillions of dollars in fresh markets and profitable investment fields for a bourgeoisie in collapse.
Wars are not a breakdown of the capitalist mode of production but an economic function that opens the system's clogged arteries with the blood of working people. World Wars I and II showed that as the crisis deepens, the scale of the instruments of destruction used grows exponentially. The logic of destruction that passed from the rifle to the machine gun, from tanks to poison gas, by the mid-1940s fixed its eye on the energy in the atom's nucleus.
6 August 1945 and Atomic Atrocity: The Demolition of Illusions
The atomic bomb named Little Boy that exploded over Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August 1945 is presented in bourgeois historiography as "a necessary decision taken to end the war quickly and save the lives of American soldiers." This is one of the most shameless illusions modern mass culture has produced. By the summer of 1945 Japan was already militarily and economically collapsed. It was under naval blockade; its raw-material sources had been cut; and it was close to surrender. Indeed, as high-ranking American military officials of the period later confessed, there was no military need whatsoever for a nuclear massacre for Japan to surrender.
| Situation | Narrative of Bourgeois Ideology | Materialist and Historical Reality |
|---|---|---|
| The Bomb's Target | "To break the Japanese war machine and end the war." | "To intimidate the Soviet Union and declare post-war global imperialist hegemony." |
| Japan's Condition | "A fanatical power that would fight to the last man and would not surrender." | "A state economically and militarily exhausted, seeking conditional surrender through diplomatic channels." |
| Timing | "The fastest solution to prevent soldier losses." | "The rush to close the sphere of influence in Asia alone by acting just before the USSR entered the Pacific War." |
| Human Balance Sheet | "A tragic war casualty." | "A cold-blooded geopolitical message and an experiment on a living human laboratory." |
The real reason for the bomb must be sought not in Tokyo but in Moscow. Throughout World War II, the power that paid the greatest price against Nazism, that lost 27 million of its citizens, and that raised the Red Flag over Berlin was the Soviet Union. The historical prestige the Red Army had won frightened American and British finance capital.
According to the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, the USSR had pledged to enter the war against Japan in August 1945. For the American bourgeoisie the equation was clear: if the Soviet Union entered the Asian front, communist movements in the region would strengthen; Moscow would have a say in Japan's future. The US had to display its atomic power immediately before Japan surrendered. Thus it would both limit the USSR's influence in Asia and declare who the absolute boss of the "New World Order" to be established after the war would be. The atomic bomb was dropped on 6 August; the USSR began the Manchuria operation on 8 August; and the US dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki on 9 August. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not the last clash of World War II; they are the first bloody move of the Cold War.
Hiroshima is at the same time an indicator of the level of "instrumental reason" and "technical barbarism" the capitalist mode of production had attained. The Manhattan Project, in which the atomic bomb was developed, is one of history's first great applications of State Monopoly Capitalism. Public resources were channeled into the project; private monopoly companies (General Electric, Westinghouse, DuPont) and the bourgeois academic world were organized around this project. The transfer of public resources led to the profits of monopoly companies, to the alienation of scientific labor, and to the technicalization of massacre.
Scientists and technicians working within this vast machinery were rendered unable, through fragmented division of labor, to see what the part they produced served. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were turned, from the standpoint of American military rationality, into mere "living laboratory objects." The bomb's blast effect at different altitudes, the destruction of high heat and radiation on human tissue, were cold-bloodedly turned into statistical data.
Hiroshima is the tragic proof that the bourgeoisie which overthrew feudalism with the slogans of "progress" and "reason" converted science, in its monopoly stage, into the most rational instrument of mass slaughter.
Technology and Atomic Energy under the Yoke of Capitalism
The bourgeois academy loves to market science and technology as a neutral "technical miracle." Dialectical materialism rejects this understanding at the root. Technology is not born in a vacuum; every technical instrument carries the imprint of the relations of production of the class society in which it is produced. As Marx set out in Capital, under capitalism mechanization is brought into play not to lighten the worker's burden but to increase control over living labor and to raise profit rates. Atomic physics is no exception to this rule. The splitting of the atom was a revolutionary step; yet the moment it was shackled by capital relations, it turned into nuclear monopolism holding humanity hostage.
| Channel of Use of Atomic Energy | Under Capitalist Relations of Production | Under Socialist / Public Planning |
|---|---|---|
| Energy Production | A source of crisis in which safety costs are cut for profit hunger and radioactive waste is dumped onto the lands of the global South. | A cheap and sustainable energy source planned for public needs, centered on human health, in harmony with nature. |
| Military Strategy | An instrument of imperialist states for global blackmail, market sharing, and domination. | The abolition of the arms industry and the transfer of science to social welfare. |
| Technological Property | A bureaucratic-military secret patented, commercialized, and hidden from the people in the hands of giant energy and arms companies. | An open and public scientific accumulation offered to the common use of all humanity. |
Even under capitalist logic, nuclear plants are objects of a "profit and cost calculation." Companies economize on safety infrastructure to make profit and abandon radioactive waste in the living spaces of poor peoples. What we saw in the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters is the damage capital's profit rationality deals to nature.
In capitalism's monopoly and imperialist phase, scientific progress undergoes a qualitative rupture: Productive forces turn directly into forces of destruction. As crises of capital accumulation seek markets and hegemony and turn toward military R&D investment, this process results in the production of nuclear, biological, and cyber forces of destruction. In this process the scientist ceases to be a free thinker and turns into a technical cog of the capital order within a fragmented division of labor.
Technological determinism—the claim that technology shapes society—is a myth. Technology does not shape society; society's class structure determines what technology will serve. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was not the inevitable result of technological development; it was the result of monopoly capitalism's seizing science and instrumentalizing it for its own survival. Science and technology are a whip in the hands of capital; in the hands of the working class they can be an instrument of emancipation in harmony with nature.
"Rational" Barbarism: The Logic of Savageization in Capitalist Culture
Bourgeois society, when it overthrew feudalism, wrote "Enlightenment" on its banner. Yet this reason, as it entered the service of capital accumulation, changed its quality and turned into instrumental reason. Instrumental reason does not interrogate the human or moral correctness of ends. It concerns itself only with how to reach the given end most quickly and effectively—that is, with "technical efficiency."
The secret key to capitalism's logic of savageization is this: An action that is entirely irrational at the social level can be carried out with magnificent rationality at the technical level.
The erasure of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a moment of hysteria; it was a "rational" operation calculated by the American military bureaucracy down to the finest detail. The bomb's detonation altitude (600 meters above ground for maximum destruction), the wooden structure of the cities, and the density of civilians were the product of a cold-blooded technical calculation. Capitalism has taken barbarism out of being a primitive emotion and, by dressing it in a laboratory coat, has turned it into a technical procedure.
Karl Marx, in the 1844 Manuscripts, examines the alienation of the human being from their own labor and from the object they produce under the capital order. As the worker produces, the object produced stands before them as an alien power that oppresses them. The nuclear age is the limit point of this alienation. Humanity's common intelligence has released the power in the atom's nucleus; yet this power, in the hands of the capitalist state apparatus, has turned into a nuclear guillotine hanging directly over its producer's head. The object human beings create with their own hands turns, under the capital order, into an alien master that can end the existence of the human species.
| Bourgeois / Ideological Discourse | Material / Materialist Reality |
|---|---|
| "Nuclear Deterrence" | The policy of nuclear terror and blackmail imperialist states conduct to hold markets. |
| "Collateral Damage" | Working-class neighborhoods bombed for capital's interests; thousands of civilians, women, and children murdered. |
| "Smart Munitions / Surgical Intervention" | High-technology weapons of mass destruction that increase destructive power and capital's arms sales. |
| "Defense of the Free World" | The effort of Western finance capital to protect its hegemony over global raw-material and market sources. |
Capitalist culture hides behind technical terminologies to legitimize the savagery it produces. This linguistic degradation aims to sever the masses' bond with reality. In everyday life, nuclear catastrophe is continually turned into "spectator material" by the mass-culture industry (Hollywood, cinema). When bourgeois cinema treats figures such as Oppenheimer, it reduces the matter to individual pangs of conscience and to a "tragedy of genius." In the films, the American finance capital behind the bomb, the class struggles, and the imperialist market fight are evaporated. Atomic massacre is turned into a visual feast that the viewer passively consumes. This culture inoculates the masses with a sense of helplessness and conceals the class culprits.
The Emancipation of the Atom and Socialist Planning
The atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 is neither a technical necessity nor a misfortune of humanity. That bomb is an inevitable output of monopoly capitalism's crises and of the logic of capital accumulation. Yet the conclusion to be drawn from this cannot be machine-breaking or a reactionary attitude toward science. The splitting of the atom is a vast leap in humanity's struggle to grasp nature. The problem is not in the atom but in the capital relations and the bourgeois state apparatus that hold that atom.
As Marx expressed it, capitalist relations of production at a certain point turn into fetters on the development of the productive forces. Capitalism, by its nature, cannot emancipate science; it is obliged to make it either a part of its profit or of its destructive power. The only way to take atomic energy out of being a horror and place it in the service of humanity is to free it from this capital fetter.
The anarchy of the market and capital's laws of competition drag science in a destructive direction. By contrast, public and socialist planning places scientific development at the command not of capital accumulation but of society's direct needs.
| Issue | Capitalist Market Anarchy | Socialist Public Planning |
|---|---|---|
| Scientific Aim | To raise profit rates, secure competitive advantage, and establish military domination. | To lighten human labor, reduce working hours, and increase social welfare. |
| Technology Management | Property hidden behind the patent and trade-secret walls of giant monopolies. | A public asset open to the control and use of all society as humanity's common heritage. |
| Nature and Energy | The unlimited and savage exploitation of nature and raw materials for capital accumulation. | Energy planning in dialectical harmony with nature, sustainable and attentive to ecological balances. |
| Risk and Safety | Economizing on safety infrastructure and human life for company profit. | Absolute safety and public oversight centered on human and nature, freed from profit anxiety. |
Under socialist planning, atomic energy ceases to be nuclear plants whose costs are cut for profit hunger and which invite environmental disasters, or weapons of mass destruction. It turns into a collective instrument that shortens the working day, provides humanity with clean energy, and extends human life in medicine and industry.
The historical dilemma Rosa Luxemburg cried out in the bloody atmosphere of World War I is far more burning today in the nuclear age: Socialism or Barbarism! Under the existence of nuclear weapons this slogan has gained a qualitative dimension: Socialism or Collective Suicide!
Today's modern bourgeois culture and art continually sell us "post-apocalypse" scenarios. The greatest illusion propagandized to us is that imagining the end of capitalism is harder than imagining the end of the world. This ideological blockade must be rejected. What has brought the planet to the brink of annihilation is not the human species but the capitalist mode of production. The solution is not, as pacifists do, to beg abstract peace from the ruling classes and wait for disarmament treaties from bourgeois institutions. Real disarmament is possible through the expropriation of the bourgeoisie that holds the weapon.
Young Comrades, to commemorate 6 August 1945 does not mean to remember a tragic day left in the past and to offer condolences. To commemorate 6 August is to decode the imperialist-capitalist system that still governs the world today and that sows the seeds of new wars and destructions. Reject the bourgeois illusions that modern science and art unleash upon us. Do not fall for the technocratic lies that present science and technology as "supra-class." Focus on material reality, on the hard flow of class struggles, and on the light of dialectical materialism. The vast power in the atom's nucleus, and all the technology human intelligence has produced, belong to the working people and to humanity who brought them into being. The capital class may dare to burn humanity in an atomic hell for the sake of protecting its own power. Our task is to tear the means of production and science from capital's hands and to begin humanity's real history. Against the barbarism of capital, we will build the world of science, of labor, and of socialism.
