Science for the People

STEM workers collectively produce the knowledge base for technical innovation 🔬📕. In their pursuit of extraordinary profit, individual capitalist firms transform these innovations into applied technologies 🏭🤖🚜. As the technology is generalized, increases in productivity can reduce the value of the things that workers need 🍎💊. But without class struggle, these changes do not result in better living conditions 🏚️ or shorter working hours ⏱️ for the working class. Instead, they decrease the value of labour power 📉🧑🏽‍🔧👩🏻‍🌾 and increase the relative surplus value extracted by the capitalist class as a whole 📈 💸 🫣. So where do publicly- and privately-funded researchers, teachers, technicians, and graduate students find themselves in this process? And, as they become increasingly conscious of their own labour alienation and deteriorating material conditions, how can they organize to join the fight as allies and members of the working class? To answer these and other questions, Science for the People goes back to its roots and back to Marxian fundamentals in « The Political Economy of Science ». Thanks to everyone who came out to celebrate the launch of this edition. A special thanks to presenters and attendees whose experiences in fields like biology and machine learning showed us how these tendencies manifest in the realities of their day-to-day work!

Les travailleur·euse·s de la science, ensemble, développent la base de connaissances nécessaire pour l’innovation technique 🔬📕. Dans leur quête de surprofit, les entreprises capitalistes transforment ces innovations en technologies appliquées 🏭🤖🚜. Les gains de productivité liés à ces progrès technologiques pourraient réduire la valeur des biens dont les travailleurs ont besoin 🍎💊. Mais sans lutte de classe, ces changements n’amènent ni meilleures conditions de vie 🏚️ ni moins d’heures de travail ⏱️ pour la classe ouvrière. À la place, ils diminuent la valeur de la force de travail 📉🧑🏽‍🔧👩🏻‍🌾et augmentent la plus-value relative que la classe capitaliste, dans son ensemble, soutire 📈 💸 🫣. Alors, dans tout ça, où se retrouvent les chercheur·euse·s, profs, technicien·ne·s et étudiant·e·s financé·e·s par le public ou le privé ? Et pendant qu’iels prennent de plus en plus conscience de leur propre aliénation au travail et de la détérioration de leurs conditions matérielles, comment peuvent-iels s’organiser pour se joindre au combat comme allié·e·s et membres de la classe ouvrière ? Pour répondre à ces questions et à d’autres, Science for the People revient à ses racines, et aux bases marxistes, avec « L’économie politique de la science ». Merci à tout le monde qui est venu fêter le lancement de ce numéro. Un merci spécial aux intervenant·e·s et participant·e·s dans des domaines comme la biologie et l’apprentissage automatique qui nous ont expliqué comment ces tendances se manifestent dans leur quotidien au travail !

Thank you to everyone who came to our magazine launch last Saturday and thanks to @sangerhall for hosting! Stay tuned for future SftP events in NYC and more opportunities for reading and discussing SftP magazine together! Check out the articles that we read and discussed: Science and Synthesis: Does Late Capitalism Constrain the Systemic Thinking Required by Science? By Helena Sheehan The Displacement Engine: How State-Driven Science Extracts from Okinawa (And What to Do About It) By Mamoru Erina /political-economy/

🚨JOIN US TOMORROW! 🔻From surveillance technology to weapons manufacturing to job recruitment programs, the STEM industry and our universities are deeply imbedded and directly complicit in US-Zionist war crimes. 🔬How can STEM students identify and fight back against the complicity of our universities and the industry as a whole? 🇵🇸Join us in collaboration with @ccnymee @sftpnyc @notechforapartheid on Thursday, April 23 at the Grove School of Engineering for a discussion surrounding the STEM industry’s role in the occupation of Palestine and the genocidal wars on Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. This event is open to all CUNY students! RSVP below👇 🔗tinyurl.com/stem4palestine 📆Thursday, April 23 ⏰12:30pm—1:45pm 🔬Exhibit Room, Grove School of Engineering 📍275 Convent Ave, New York NY 10031 🚊Take the 1 to 137th or the A/C/B/D to 145th

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS (DUE APRIL 30) Society for the Social Studies of Science Open Panel: Counter-Institutional Knowledge Production.  “The value of any academic thesis or intellectual position should be measured on the basis of whether it can be understood and used in the trench, the refugee camp, the tunnel and the prison cell. The task of the intellectual committed to resistance is to help provide a strategic compass for the masses, not to produce abstract knowledge that entrenches political alienation.”  - Charter for Comprehensive Revolutionary Liberation Despite advertising themselves as sites of knowledge production and freedom of speech, universities actively manufacture ignorance through dissimulation and censorship. This is particularly egregious when it comes to American and Canadian universities’ complicity in the occupation and genocide in Palestine. On the one hand, universities mask their own financial and academic ties to the Zionist regime, and on the other, universities readily suppress pro-Palestinian organizing and discipline anti-colonial / anti-imperialist researchers. SftP Toronto is hosting an open panel at the 4S conference on October 7-10, 2026, to bring together actors in counter-institutional knowledge production. What is the role of science and technology in the occupation of Palestine and the resistance to the occupation? How do universities work to maintain ignorance regarding Palestine? What is the role of universities determining what is known and what is ignored? Can the “popular universities” that sprung up in the Palestine solidarity encampments serve as new sites of knowledge production and sharing? If you are working on a project that aims to address these and similar questions, we invite you to submit a proposal, using the link below.  Link to create a profile and submit a proposal: /sftp4s Proposal Deadline: April 30, 2026

Join Science for the People NYC on Saturday April 25th at 4pm for the magazine launch of our latest issue, “The Political Economy of Science.” This issue explores how capitalism, funding structures, and power dynamics shape what gets researched, who benefits, and whose knowledge counts. We will give a brief history of the magazine and organization and discuss selected readings. Come grab a drink and some food and meet members from Science for the People NYC! All are welcome! 🔗: https://bit.ly/polieconsftp (Link in bio)

Batool Almarzouq offers a critique of the extractivist underpinnings of the open science movement, showing how the language of democratization can be mobilized in ways that reproduce colonial hierarchies and unequal relations of knowledge production. They write “even when the Global South gains representation at the table of Open Science, they are never allowed to rewrite the rules of the game.” Read the full article, “Rethinking Open Science Through Dependency Theory,” on our website, link in bio. We are committed to keeping our content freely accessible online. Print subscriptions therefore play a vital role in keeping the publication and organization active. If you have never subscribed, we would love it if you could support Science for the People with a print or digital subscription. If you are a former subscriber, we hope that you will consider resubscribing and help sustain the magazine over the next few years.

😶‍🌫️ DEMYSTIFYING DATA CENTRES: 📱🌳 Settler-capitalism obscures the material processes and social relations that underlie our daily interactions with our phones and our computers: processes grounded in egregious resource consumption, land theft, and the violent repression of Indigenous communities. Reduced to passive consumers, we are meant to feel helplessly dependent on digital services that we could never hope to understand, let alone control. The first step in taking back our power is demystifying the systems that are harming us. 👩🏻‍💻🌱 As Marina Johnson-Zafiris reminded us during the People’s Server Workshop last month, a server is nothing more than a computer that you can learn to build yourself at home, and every data center project consists of physical land and infrastructure that can be blocked, targeted, and reclaimed for the people. ⛓️ 📄Slides from Marina’s DIY server workshop are now available at our linktree in bio. They include step-by-step instructions on how to build your own server using Yunohost, as well as a QR code to access our Signal skill share/ support group. 💬 If you attended the workshop, drop us a line to let us know how your own DIY server project is going! 👀👂🏻✊🏻 #Data #AI #datacentre #datacenter #colonialism

In describing “The Feudal Lords of Science” as “a kind of Bermuda Triangle of scientific publishing, where public money enters but then effectively disappears in an opaque system,” Salem Ghribi (@salghr ) traces the funneling of public funds into the for-profit scientific publishing system. Ghribi writes, “just as governments allow credit rating agencies to shape economic decisions, despite conflicts of interest or systemic flaws, scientists and institutions accept the dominant role of publishers, because doing so offers tangible advantages–prestige, visibility, and influence–even if it reinforces a parasitic structure.” Read the full article at the link in our bio for Ghribi’s call: “publishing must be re-centered as a commons, serving collective progress rather than private gain.” Support our publishing! Our magazine is produced entirely by volunteers, and all proceeds from subscriptions and donations support contributors, artists, and the broader work of the organization and its many chapters. Every subscription directly strengthens our ability to support organizing, education, and solidarity work across the organization—from supporting tenant unions fighting negligent landlords and management companies against lead and mold contamination, to agitating against military industries on university campuses, to making knowledge of radical science via engagement with theory and history available for all.

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the coup d’état that inaugurated the last of Argentina’s military dictatorships. As author Alejo Stark writes, "the Abuelas (Grandmothers) of Plaza de Mayo were among the first to organize publicly against the dictatorship. Having lost their own children, they began searching for their grandchildren—many of whom were born in clandestine detention centers before their parents were murdered... Argentine geneticist, bioethicist, and activist Dr. Víctor Penchaszadeh played a crucial role in connecting the Abuelas with scientists to develop the index of grandparentage and forge the international networks that sustained what would become the National Genetic Data Bank, whose archive is now named after him." In this newly published interview, Penchaszadeh describes: "They asked me: 'would it be possible, after the return to democracy, to identify the stolen children, given that their parents cannot be genetically tested because they have been disappeared? Would it be possible to use their grandparents’ blood to assign the genetic identity of any of the several hundred abducted children who were being raised under a false identity?'” Moved by the passion of their request, he explains, "I was at a watershed moment in my life, having finally found the mission I had unconsciously been searching for years: to redeem genetics from its somber past of having been utilized for violations of human rights, such as discrimination, racism, eugenics and genocide." Read the full interview, "Redeeming Genetics," on our website, including a link to donate and support the ongoing work of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.

In “The Missing Pieces in the Road to Ending Biopiracy,” authors Eduardo Echeverri López (@eduardoecheverril ) and Mireia López-Sánchez Girbén (@mireialosang ) state that “biopiracy has evolved. While once it involved physically collecting seeds, plants, or knowledge, today it often happens through open-access databases.” The Cali fund, established in 2024 at COP16 was meant to redistribute the benefits of digital sequence information (DSI) use to biodiversity-rich countries and Indigenous peoples, but as an entirely voluntary mechanism, it “risks normalizing the very injustice at the core of biopiracy–the extraction of genetic resources and knowledge from the Global South without consent nor compensation.” Five months after its launch, no company had contributed. “The Fund [also] lacks mechanisms to trace DSI back to its source, or to ensure that communities know their data is being used.” Read the full article on our website, including the authors’ demand that “ending biopiracy requires more than financial redistribution. It requires legal and epistemic justice.” Art by Izara Achamyalesh (zewmageddon.fka)

Author Eric Brown (@ned.isakoff ) writes of the state of Maine’s complicity, and specifically the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, in the “Military-Insdustrial-Etc.-Complex” as it enjoys a 700% increase in Department of Defense funding over the last decade. Much of this increase followed a new Arctic Defense Initiative, which “multiplied investments in commercial and military-industrial infrastructure and manufacturing in Alaska, Maine, and the Pacific Northwest, and birthed an Ambassador at Large for Arctic Affairs in 2024,” restoring “that glorious American virtue–leadership (in resource extraction). In describing the financialization and weaponization of climate science, Brown demands that worker-scientists stop making excuses and self-censoring, stating that “it’s possible (and absolutely necessary) to reimagine what science does and for whom.” Read “Oxy-Morons: The Arctic, US National Defense, and the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute” at the link in our bio or subscribe to the print and/or digital editions of the magazine. Art by Eric Brown.