Author: tamara.rudic

The New Haven chapter of Science for the People stands in solidarity with Yalies4Palestine and strongly condemns the Yale University administration for its ongoing repression of Y4P, including the latest action of stripping the group of its student organization status and its ongoing shameful support of the genocide against the Palestinian people by the zionist regime.

While Yale University continues to punish student activists and stifle the protest and free speech rights of those opposing the worst possible crime, it turns a blind eye to zionist counter-protestors who harass and dox anti-genocide students (while throwing baseless allegations of antisemitism with full impunity), welcomes war criminals – israeli minister Itamar Ben Gvir, an abhorrent anti-Arab racist, a serial abuser of human rights, an architect of genocide (a terrorist even by israel’s standards!) – and continues to profit from investments in genocide.

As the casualties in Gaza continue to rise by hundred eery day, as Palestinians in the West Bank and occupied territories continue to be terrorized, abducted, and murdered by the zionist occupation, as the israeli blockade of Gaza has now prevented any food from entering for two months, with the resulting intentional famine already claiming more lives, we reaffirm in the strongest of terms:

We stand with all people of conscience who protest, disrupt, and fight against the zionist agenda.

We stand with the Student Intifada and Yalies4Palestine.

We stand with the people of Palestine and all peoples subject to occupation, oppression, and genocide.

Free Palestine!

This statement was originally posted on the main Science for the People website by the SftP Steering Committee and is reproduced here.

Nearly a decade after the slogan “Believe Science” became popularized, the established scientific profession is once again called upon by the opposition to the second Trump administration to take a political stance. Whereas the first such “defense of science” in 2017 confronted conspiratorial dismissals of the scientific consensus on climate change and science education, the battlefront in 2025 has retreated so far that the rightwing offensive has directly disrupted federal science funding on which much research production in the United States depends. Between 2017 and today, we have faced planetary crises, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, wildfires and floods on unprecedented scales, and still-accelerating CO2 emissions, as well as the rising tide of neofascism. Not only has a liberal defense of science been unable to weather the metaphorical and literal storms, it has also contented itself with making technologies that enable more destructive wars and genocide. How did we get here? Why did the “defense” fail? What is to be done differently?

We recognize that science is inherently political. Science is defined as a set of human practices relating to knowledge that arises from, is shaped by, and helps reproduce the social systems in which it is embedded. Thus, science is not an objective good or neutral tool; it interpenetrates with all other social phenomena such as class, race, sex, gender, geography, and culture. Science throughout history is practiced unequally, benefits few, excludes many, and is inextricable from its human consequences. To defend “science,” we must first ask: Science for whom? By what means? Toward what ends? 

Science is subordinate to class interests. Under capitalism, imperialism, white supremacism, cis-hetero-patriachy and other oppressive systems, the owners of science—the corporations, the wealthy elites, the military-industrial complex—dictate the agenda of scientific research, public education of science, and the market supply, demand, and price of scientific labor. This ruling class taunts scientists with the myths of individualism and meritocracy (in its celebration of personalities like Musk and Bezos) while extracting our work and dictating our livelihood. This ruling class exerts full control of the political system under so-called liberal democracy, and both parties and their politicians operate within the constraints of the ruling class consensus. As witnessed during the disastrous pandemic response then and the market-driven neglect now when vulnerable populations continue to die, appealing to the elected officials to defend science is a dead-end. In order to assert political agency as science workers, we must organize our own workplaces and communities in solidarity with the broader working class and social movements in a common struggle.

Science has been made possible by colonialism and imperialism. Scientific advancement in the US in particular, and the Global North in general, is built upon historical and present-day colonial plundering of land, resources, and labor, as well as draining of scientific expertise through migration from the Global South. “Progress” and “enlightenment” for the privileged few are exploitation, destruction, and displacement for the many. American science is complicit in national chauvinism, conquest, and oppression of knowledge production in other parts of the world. Science workers in the Global North must recognize our privileged position and be conscious of the social consequences of our sciences.

Science must encompass all fields of human inquiry. Science involves not only the study of the natural world, but also of society. The demarcation of STEM from other academic disciplines is an artifact of the structure of US science funding, which has resulted in uneven practice of human knowledge. The humanities and social sciences have long been threatened by rightwing offensives including funding cuts, adjunct hiring, departmental mergers, suspension of admissions, and censoring of scholarship—all of which warrant much greater attention and solidarity by those attempting to mount a defense of science. It is crucially important to reject STEM exceptionalism and to join and learn from the wider struggles against repression in higher education, especially facing increased state-sponsored terror against immigrant student workers and academics.

Defending science is not enough; science must defend the people. The attacks on science and academia did not occur on a whim. It is a continuation of the ongoing expropriation of the infrastructure of knowledge production and the accelerated privatization (degradation) of public institutions. It is a logical next step in a class war to defund education, healthcare, and any enterprise that retains the promise of benefiting working people and communities. This informs what types of science are undergoing austerity and what other types might experience booms: privatized high tech, military, agribusiness, and philanthrocapitalist pharmaceutical manufacturing and sales. Thus, instead of defending an abstract notion of science, we must scrutinize: science for whom, toward what ends? We defend a science that is for ecological restoration, vaccine development, transgender healthcare—a science that supports the wellbeing of people and the environment. We reject a science that is funded by the military, the fossil fuel industry, and Israel. We condemn a science that serves no benefit to the people other than accumulating profit.

We believe that a science for the people and a humane future can only be achieved through fundamental transformations of society. Join or start your local SftP chapter, build a militant science worker movement in principled solidarity with Palestine, Congo, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and everywhere imperialist science is detrimental to the oppressed. Organize to redirect society so that society can redirect science.

The New Haven chapter of Science for the People invites all scientists, tech and academic workers in Connecticut and beyond to join us in the struggle against capitalism, the reactionary politics that undergird it, and the false promise of liberalism as a political alternative. 

The only real alternative is to establish vibrant anti-capitalist mass organizations.

Trump returning to the White House signals a serious decline in the ability of liberalism to justify itself as a progressive political alternative to reactionary conservatism. For decades, liberalism and conservatism have operated as two faces of the same coin: hand-in-hand they propel capitalism forward by inertia, if nothing else. 

As such, we see that liberalism fails again and again to secure even the most basic protections for abortion access, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community, a weakness that will now be exploited by Trump and his neo-fascist cronies. 

What does this mean for scientists, for whom liberalism is often the political partner to the perceived progress of science?

First we should ask: what has liberalism offered to science as a human endeavor? 

Our view is that liberalism has duped scientists again and again. While budgets for vital basic research recede and scientific activity is further cordoned off into private firms with no accountability to the public, liberals have turned a blind eye to the impending climate catastrophe and placed science in deeper subservience to the military industrial complex. This makes scientists the stooges of capitalism, imperialism, and ecological exploitation against their will, the consequences of which have become devastatingly apparent as the genocide in Gaza proceeds uninhibited with the full support of the Democratic Party. 

Moreover, as science continues to become a more diverse profession, the oppression of people with marginalized identities will not only hurt our friends and colleagues, but undermine scientific work by making the discipline even more precarious for many people. 

How can scientists resist this depravity and build a better alternative?

We compel scientists to realize their role as agents in class struggle, rather than elite, individual, and politically disaffected actors.

Science is a social endeavor, driven by the combined efforts of vast numbers of people working diligently across the globe. The products of science form the basis of the modern world: technological advancements most often start in publicly-funded laboratories. But most scientists have no control over how the products of their research are used. Our disciplines are driven by university administrators, venture capitalists, and the boards of tech companies. Scientists are thereby made more and more into proletarians: cogs trained in the academic machine to which we must submit in return for a paltry wage, insufficient benefits, and no social safety net. 

We do not have to accept this fate.

We should accept that the conditions of science are deteriorating under the stewardship of liberalism, and with them the conditions of life on Earth. We believe this ought to compel scientists to recognize that their fate is intertwined with that of all proletarianized working people, in the so-called US and around the world. If this is true, it’s about time we start acting like it!

Scientists need to organize within the working class, and we offer Science for the People as a home for all scientific workers to begin to organize in opposition to capitalism, the false hope of liberalism, and the depravity of conservatism and neo-fascism. 

This means that scientific workers need to rebuild the infrastructure of working class institutions in their workplaces, their apartment buildings, and in their communities. Whether we are fighting for better wages, reduced rents, or against imperialism, we should be cohering these struggles into a unified political movement against capitalism and for socialism. 

Join us – You have nothing to lose but your chains!