IT IS ENCOURAGING to see Socialist Challenge opening its pages to representatives of the campaign against nuclear power ecologists and Marxists is long overdue. As part of that debate, there are several points in Rob ELICIE Christmas issue which nood takingup, For Marxists, it is a fairly hace noston List a Communis! or socialist society must take DYLE and build on all the technological, scientific, cultural developments revious bourgoois societies For us, technologies and scientific developments are not destructive or undesirable in themselves — neither do such developments or discoveries themselves take societies forward, or hold them back.
Always, for us, it is the social relations into which such technologies enter which renders them dangerous or alternatively progressive, The splitting of the atom and the enormous potential for unleashing energy from within matter - was probably the most important practical scientific achievement of the twentieth century, It was, in turn, made possible by the most important theoretical gain: Einstein 3 theories of relativity.
LIBERATING For us, such discoveries indicate potentially liberating forces for the whole ol humanity on an coormous scale; to free chem from hunger, cold, and sociaily unnecessary. degrading manual labour. There are also, of course, in the present coonomic and political situation, polentially destructive possibilities, in the form of nuciar »capons. we nave lo work towards a bulance forces where potential is minimised and eventually extinguished, maximising the productive potential of such forces.
Toreject nuclear power perse Be suppress DE Lore Ho il) as Rob Edwards and the bulk movement want to do, is to backward looking, naive form of 'luddism', Basically, they don't want to tackle the social relations underlying capitalism, through revolutionary change. ocle the ils of society simpl within the development of Edwards *People do not want more high technology and the alienation which it implies — they especially don't want a technology that is unavoidably wedded to humanity's most. fearsome weapon'.
Let us ignore the mechanical 'guilt by association" argument used to demand nuciear power. For Edwards "high technology"
"alienation SAILELSE argument is pur forward by John Fowles elsewhere in the same issue Socialist hand, "alienation" is not a result of technology, but the relations governing such technology.
We recognise chat a planned economy, controlled by involving the whole of tbe working class, could harness all large-scale technologs.
cluding nuclear energy, socially beneficial ends.
people could feel genuine control over these processes.
Edwards' solution lies elsewhere: Alternative energy strategies, CUTL small-scale, docentralised use of the um. wind sod waves at leist offer the possibility of n society and