Tag: Statement

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

In its monstrous assault upon the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people on January 3, the United States has kidnapped president Nicholás Maduro Moros and first lady Cilia Flores, killing at least 100 people. Leading up to this operation, the US extrajudicially murdered at least 123 people in strikes in and around the Caribbean and intensified its military occupation of Puerto Rico [1]. These strikes, in addition to serving their primary function of resource theft at gunpoint, followed the imperialist tradition of epistemicide: the targeted destruction of knowledge and the means of producing it. Among destroyed infrastructure were a medicine and food warehouse at La Guaira port, and vital research facilities of the Mathematics Center of the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research (IVIC), Miranda State [2].

The specificity and intentionality of the assault recalls the 1998 bombing of the Sudanese Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical Facility, a statement by US imperialism, then as now, of its demand for total monopoly on knowledge production and its intention to leverage human necessities as weapons of war. Such attacks are tactics of underdevelopment, designed to undermine the sovereign capacity and self-determination of formerly colonized nations. Incessant warfare and the business of death and genocide, such as what we have witnessed for the last 828 days in Gaza, where universities and generations of stored knowledge were systematically eradicated, are the final refuge of capital in its endless drive to shore up profit rates.

What is under assault is not merely a nation-state, but also a concrete experiment in socialist construction. Emerging from the Bolivarian Revolution, Venezuela’s communal project has sought to combine revolutionary state power with grassroots popular institutions—communal councils and communes that organize production, land, health, education, and knowledge itself as social property [3]. It is precisely this effort to institutionalize popular power, rooted in working-class, Indigenous, and Afro-Venezuelan traditions of collective self-governance, representing a living experiment in self-determined development, that makes Venezuela a target of sustained U.S. aggression.

As funding for health and environmental research across the United States is stripped away at breakneck pace to funnel all ingenuity and labor into military buildup, mass surveillance, and internment, it is becoming apparent that scientific endeavor for the betterment of humankind and preservation of life is unattainable under the current system. Faced with the decline of the unipolar world economic order that dominated the post–Cold War era of “globalization” and “free trade,” the capitalists of the US-led Global North see the prospect of more aggressive foreign policy and intensifying domestic repression as a golden opportunity to profit from death and destruction. This futile attempt to stave off capital’s primary contradiction, its tendency toward economic and ecological crisis, is nevertheless pursued by a capitalist class whose interests are totally antithetical to the greater needs of human society, culminating in acts of base piracy and a hatred for the pursuit of truth.

We at Science for the People wholly reject and condemn the endless spiral towards warfare for profit of the United States, exemplified by its latest cruelties against Venezuela and its revolutionary project. We reject the monopolization and direction of scientific labor towards the death-dealing technologies deployed by the military and police forces, just as we rejected it across decades of US warfare, during the war against Vietnam, from the nuclear arms race and Cold War interventions to Iraq, Afghanistan, and today in Gaza and Venezuela. We stand in full solidarity with the people of Venezuela in their project of creating an alternative to capitalist society, of daring to invent the future. We demand a full withdrawal of all US military presence on the nation’s shores so that its people may utilize their natural resources for their own development and their own knowledge-creation, rather than for the enrichment of US empire and ghoulish oil industry billionaires.

References

1. “After Undercounting Boat Strike Killings, U.S. Military Updates Death Toll,” The Intercept, January 8, 2026, https://theintercept.com/2026/01/08/us-military-boat-strike-deaths-undercount/.
2. “Confirmed: The United States completely destroyed a vital scientific and academic center in Venezuela, located in Miranda state,” Camila [@camilapress], January 7, 2026, https://x.com/camilapress/status/2008934970916782243.
3. Ángel Prado and Cira Pascual Marquina, “Venezuela’s Communal Project,” Monthly Review, August 2025, https://monthlyreview.org/articles/venezuelas-communal-project/; Miguel Ángel Núñez, “Contributions of Peasant Farmer Communities,” Science for the People 25, no. 1 (Spring 2022), https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol25-1-the-soil-and-worker/contributions-of-peasant-farmer-communities-the-case-of-venezuela/.

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!

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

As all of us mourn the lives lost to the latest upsurge of violence, how do we appropriately understand what has been happening in the past few days in Gaza?

Israel’s National Security Minister, an ultra-nationalist instigator of violence convicted eight times including on charges of rioting and supporting a terrorist organization, once prohibited from serving in the Israeli military, is now in command of its security apparatus.

Israel’s Finance Minister declared the intent “to be cruel,” spoke of Palestinians as “human animals,” and enunciated the plan to deprive Gaza of food, fuel, and water. 

Gaza, an open-air prison under siege by the extreme-right Israeli state since 2007, home to two million people, half of them children, is now under nonstop aerial bombardment that exposes the people and environment to toxic chemicals like white phosphorus.

Israel’s Prime Minister made clear its government’s aim of emptying out 1.1 million Palestinians in northern Gaza, which he claims is “only the beginning.” 

This is a premeditated massacre and cleansing of an Indigenous population. 

The governments of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany all quickly pledged their “steadfast and united support” of Israel, whose leaders are now stepping up their implementation of genocide.

Such historic injustice has not occurred in isolation. It is the culmination of a century-long Zionist project facilitated by the capitalist class across the Global North: through the military-industrial war machine that profits from dispossession and destruction of Palestinian land; through the mainstream media that feed off dehumanizing the Palestinian people, erasing their history, and turning sentiments of humanity into pretexts for barbarity; through technoscientific development—which we as scientists and engineers are complicit in—funded by and funneled into bolstering the apartheid apparatus of Israel; as well as through the hypocrisy of Western academia, which, for all its professed values of “anti-racism” and “decolonization,” continues to acquiesce to settler-colonialism.

It is therefore our duty as members of Science for the People—an organization born out of the struggle against US atrocities in Vietnam, with predecessors who fought against apartheid South Africa, fascist regimes across Latin  America, and above all, US imperialism—to take concrete steps in this dark moment and plant the seeds of revolutionary change.

1) As scientists, we must inform our politics through deep and thorough analyses of history, circumstances, and structures. The struggle against colonization has always been fought by people of all ethnicities and religions, and Zionism has historically been opposed by left-wing Jewish leaders, scientists, and activists. We stand unequivocally in solidarity with the Palestinian people and condemn the seventy-five plus years of Zionist crimes that led to this genocide. 

2) As workers within the academic-industrial complex, the products of our labor are subsumed by systemic forces and co-opted for war, which prompts us to reflect on ourselves and the institutions we work for. How much funding has an institution received from foundations with explicitly Zionist aims, and does this correlate with the callousness toward Palestinian students in recent university statements on the events unfolding in Gaza? What techniques, ideology, or both concurrently (as in the attempted biologization of the Jewish race) have been developed in any given field of study, under constraints set by our own settler-colonial system, to uphold the status quo? How has the notion of “progress” in the name of science been propped up by the Israeli state and its Western allies to mask the retrogression of their coloniality? This moment reveals the urgent need and opportunity to achieve a higher level of political consciousness among scientists. We must accelerate this process.

3) As activists and organizers, reflection on our complicity barely reaches the minimum of what’s required. What can we do as an organization to materially support the Palestinian cause? What can we contribute to our coalition partners at the frontline that are weathering racist and Orientalist abuses? How to resist the appropriation of science and technology by the colonizers? Within academia, we witness pro-Palestine voices being drowned out and those that dare speak out against genocide being prosecuted, fired, or silenced at the behest of political and economic interests of the Israeli apartheid state and transnational corporations that profit from the Occupation. How do we connect our own class struggle against the academic-industrial complex with local advocacy for Palestinian rights and the global liberation movements? There is an urgent need and opportunity to educate, agitate, organize, protect those who speak the truth, push back against Zionism, build labor militancy and internationalism among oppressed classes.

The Palestinian struggle is our struggle. Radical science demands of its practitioners clarity of thought and courage for action. SftP calls on all members and supporters to collectively pursue concrete strategies toward the liberation of Palestine.

Get involved and act now.