Letter from the Editor

The anarchist response to the emergence of COVID-19 put divisions in the
movement into stark relief. On the one hand, many recognized its
severity and the resulting need for quarantine, social distancing, and
vaccination. There was a strong moral imperative to protect those who
were immunocompromised, elderly, or at heightened risk, even if it meant
sacrificing some personal freedoms. On the other hand, many decried the
state response to the pandemic as authoritarian, the enforcement of
vaccine mandates as dictatorial, and the involvement of big
pharmaceutical companies in producing and marketing the vaccine as
encouraging the capitalist stranglehold on health. As the writer of Anathema
put it, “In the name of ‘public health’ all sorts of security measures
are coming together to create an authoritarian wet dream” (“COVID-19: A
Fork in the Road,” 2020, p. 3).

In many cases these are valid critiques. In the Philippines, for
example, soldiers with assault rifles patrolled quarantine checkpoints
during the early days of the pandemic (Magsalin, 2020), and the steps
the Chinese Communist Party took enforce lockdown orders can only be
described as despotic. Despite this, though, the pandemic offered
opportunities for anarchists to organize—especially in mutual aid
networks, eviction protests, and rent strikes (Firth, 2020).

In the five years since the pandemic began, however, I fear these
legitimate criticisms have morphed into a broader distrust of science
and medicine in the anarchist space. An anonymous writer to Montreal Counter-Information
feared that we as a society now demand that “experts tucked away in
labs using esoteric methods act as the only voices in the room to
generate one-size-fits-all policy declarations for entire nations”
(Anonymous, 2021). Another anonymous writer to i giorni e le notti (reprinted in English in The Local Kids)
accused the creators of the COVID-19 vaccine of being “eugenicists
––and sterilizers of poor women” (Anonymous, 2022, section iv). I’ve met
anti-vax punks at shows, and I’ve heard rumors that others have
encountered the same (three6666, 2023). And this is setting aside the
existing critiques of science and technology posed by primitivists. All
of this echoes the anti-science and anti-health sentiments that have
engulfed the right wing.

Years before the pandemic, William Gillis noted, “It’s no secret that a
good portion of the left today considers science profoundly uncool”
(2015). As our title suggests, The Peer Review runs contrary to that
assertion. This issue is devoted to exploring ten theses about science
and public health, as seen through a radical anarchist lens.

1. Every Anarchist Should Be a Scientist…

In the article that provides the title for this thesis, Isis Lovecruft
(2016) wrote, “We should never allow ourselves to become so rigid as to
forget what makes us anarchists in the first place: childlike curiosity,
incessant inquiry, and a radical love for taking things to their roots
to further our understanding. We seek to dismantle the world around us,
knowing that it does not function as well as it could. We want to
understand ourselves, our environment, and each other. We want the
blueprints for the social machine, so we can sledgehammer the fuck out
of it, and build it back up from scratch” (p. 5). And, as she points
out, that sounds quite a bit like science.

In describing science, A.R. Prasanna reminds us that it “is not just a
collection and collation of known facts,” but “a philosophy derived out
of experience, innovation, and verification or validation” (2022, p. 6).
It is not simply sterile empiricism or institutional authority, but
rather a restless pursuit of understanding. In this light, the anarchist
drive to dismantle the social machine and rebuild it “from scratch”
echoes the foundations of science—it’s not a dogma to follow blindly,
but a process grounded in experience, exploration, and discovery. In
that sense, it’s not that every anarchist should be a scientist—it’s that every anarchist is a scientist.

2. …and Every Scientist Should Be an Anarchist

As William Gillis (2016) wrote in the article that—similar to
Lovecruft—gave this thesis its name, “Control can only be achieved
through disengagement and rigidity. And so any successful power
structure must involve mechanisms to punish and suppress habits of
inquiry” (p. 1). It is no secret that science, both as an area of study
and a community, has its problems. Overreliance on funding either from
private industry or from the government places restrictions—both overt
and subtle—on what can and can’t be studied. It is exorbitantly
expensive to publish in some of the most prestigious journals, with Nature
charging authors as much as €9,500 ($10,800 in April 2025) for review
and publication (Brainard, 2020). Women, persons with disabilities, and
ethnic and racial minorities are disproportionately underrepresented in
STEM careers (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics,
2021).

Far from stifling scientific innovation, an anarchist society could work
to resolve many of these issues. Bureaucratic inefficiencies will be
reduced by dismantling and collectivizing large research organizations.
The abolition of social and material hierarchies will provide
underrepresented individuals greater opportunity to study science. The
embrace of a community model (see thesis #4) will prevent the
accumulation of capital by the benefactors of scientific research and
instead focus on what benefits specific communities the most. In short,
anarchism has a plethora of solutions to offer any scientist interested
in improving the existing system.

3. Science is Methodical, Not Political

Unlike what tech billionaires will have you believe, technocracy is not
the logical or inevitable result of embracing science. In the worst-case
scenario, “Those of higher knowledge, status, or authority—experts—take
it upon themselves, justified by their epistemic monopoly, to both
define and solve the problem for nonexperts” (Byland & Packard, as
cited in Caplan, 2023, p. S107). Nonexperts, in this situation, are
expected to simply accept what the experts decide. In response, Arthur
Caplan points out that “correcting that problem hardly means rejecting
the input of scientific experts…Science tells us what can be done; the
political task is to decide what ought be done within the constraints
and boundaries that science provides” (2023, p. S107). Technocracy is a
failure of democracy—not of science—and good scientists can inform the
public on important issues without claiming political authority over
those topics.

In fact, scientists oftentimes rebel against contemporaneous political
power. The Roman Inquisition burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600
for arguing that the universe contained other stars and planets. Apotex,
a multinational pharmaceutical company, publicly attacked Nancy
Olivieri in the 1990s after her research found that one The Roman
Inquisition burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600 for arguing that
the universe contained other stars and planets. Apotex, a multinational
pharmaceutical company, publicly attacked Nancy Olivieri in the 1990s
after her research found that one of their drugs, deferiprone, caused
liver dysfunction. The German right wing was enraged by Albert
Einstein’s work on relativity (as well as his pacifism), which led to
Nazi officials stripping him of his academic positions and publicly
burning his books. While scientists can sometimes assume positions of
authority, science itself is only a method of uncovering empirical facts
about the world. And sometimes those facts run contrary to existing
power structures.

4. Science Should Be Done with Communities, Not to Communities

Science is most effective when it is the product of collaboration,
especially with research subjects. Historically, scientists and
researchers have often treated the communities they are working with
purely as sources of data, ignoring the impact their research has on the
rights and well-being of the participants. The Tuskegee syphilis
experiment is one of the most notorious examples: the U.S. Public Health
Service spent forty years studying the progression of syphilis in a
group of impoverished black men, giving them sugar pills as “treatment”
and, for some participants, failing to inform them that they had the
disease at all (Jones, 2008). Luckily, we are beginning to see signs of
change. There has been a concerted push in recent decades to see
communities as partners in research rather than a means to an end.

Citing a long history of exploitation in research, especially among
indigenous peoples, Emily Doerksen et al. noted in their 2024 paper
“Community-led approaches to research governance” that the communities
that are commonly studied have been increasingly “voicing their demands
for authority in the governance of research involving them” (p. 2). They
identify three strategies that have been employed:

1. The development of research guidelines by community representatives,

2. Community review boards to assess the ethics of proposed research initiatives in their jurisdictions

3. Community advisory boards that work in tandem with researchers to ensure that their cultural norms are being respected

Such governance helps to move science in a more participatory direction
that ultimately has the potential to benefit both researchers and
research subjects.

There is certainly still much to be done, and a number of scientists
doggedly refuse to abide by these practices. However, Doerksen et al.’s
work, as well as the work of other clinical ethicists, shows that there
are possibilities to move beyond the quasi-colonial approaches of
yesteryear.

5. Bring Down the Lab Elite, Not the Lab

Justin Podur (2014) distinguishes between three aspects of being a
scientist: Science A, Science, B, and Science C. Science A (for
Authority) is the authoritative stance that scientists can take when
discussing matters of public interest. Science B (for Business) is the
pragmatic, day-to-day routine of being a scientist: applying for grants,
trying to publish in elite journals, etc. Science C (for Curiosity) is
what science is supposed to be—it is the fundamental curiosity that
drives scientists to try to understand the world. In his view, too much
emphasis on Science B has turned science into an elitist, profit-driven
enterprise that has moved scientists further from Science A and Science
C. He writes, “Most of what scientists do is try to raise funds,
generate publications in prestigious journals, find students to work on
their projects, and keep up with other scientists according to these
metrics. Science B operates like other sectors of capitalist society”​
(2014). Science must be liberated from the “dictates of profit” in order
to return it to its intended purpose.

William Gillis (2015) sees the same elitism at work. He distinguishes
the scientific method from “Science!” (with a capital S and an
exclamation point), or the view that the world can be systematized,
ordered, and ultimately dominated. The latter functions as a surrogate
for corporate domination: “Science! is how our paymasters excuse the
damage our widget causes in military or economic application” (2015).
He, however, sees science (with a lowercase s) as fundamentally
radical—rather than merely an empirical pursuit, it is a search for the
“deepest roots” of the physical universe. Scientists must remember to
keep “digging for the roots” in order to maintain the spirit of
scientific inquiry.

What both writers mean, I believe, is that we can reject the parts of
scientific culture that are laser-focused on attaining grant awards,
abusing grad students, and kowtowing to the desires of big business.
What will remain is the core characteristics of the scientific method:
curiosity, hypothesis, and discovery. In short, there’s no reason to
throw the baby out with the bathwater—we can focus on moving science
away from its dependence on corporate interests and back to its original
spirit.

6. Nobody Knows Everything…

The belief that individuals can be wholly self-sufficient is a myth. In
reality, each of us has only a scattering of the skills we need to
thrive in the modern age (and the pre-modern age too, for that matter).
We need to rely on others to help us with the remainder. Human beings
are social animals—we have been grouping together for hundreds of
thousands of years in order to survive, and that impulse will not be
disappearing anytime soon. In fact, the drive to be entirely
self-sufficient echoes a profoundly capitalist mindset. In “Against
Self-Sufficiency,” Sever writes, “We never bear our own weight, and to
speak truthfully, we never feed ourselves” (2017, p. 32). They argue
that self-sufficiency—defined here as a complete lack of dependence on
others—is in fact an illusion that arose from capitalism, colonialism,
and bourgeois individualism. The desire to rely only on oneself for
survival obscures an important truth: community is absolutely essential.
(Yes, it’s ironic that I’m quoting an Anti-Civ publication in a zine
about science. But while I disagree with much of primitivism, Sever
still makes some good points).

Mutual aid frameworks begin with this understanding. Dean Spade defines
mutual aid as “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs,
usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not
going to meet them” (2020, p. 11). Whether in the form of soup kitchens,
legal assistance, or housing support, mutual aid is built on
cooperation and interpersonal solidarity. No single person is a doctor, a
mechanic, an elementary school teacher, and a librarian, but every
community needs someone with each of these skills in order to run
smoothly.

7. …but Everybody Knows Something

Science, when done correctly, can fit well into the concept of mutual
aid. Scientists have developed a specific skillset and corpus of
knowledge over lifetimes of study, and these particular competencies are
useful not only in laboratories but in daily life. Prasanna, for
example, writes that the scientific thought process begins with ordinary
curiosity: “It is something we all see and experience in day-to-day
routines if only we stop and question after the action as to why did I
do it?” (2022, p. viii). Science—good science, at least—doesn’t require
researchers to shut themselves in universities away from the world.
Rather, science actually opens pathways to participate in community
building.

Modern capitalist societies tend to emphasize the partitioning of both
individuals and knowledge into tiny, self-sealing pieces. Mutual aid
models, by contrast, are built on interdependence—epistemic as well as
material. We should be thinking together, not simply living together.
Contrary to assumptions connecting science and technocracy, scientists
should not act as infallible authorities in a society, but as
contributors—trusted, yes, but also embedded in a much larger network of
thinking individuals. As Prasanna further notes, science is a
“continuous process with a firm beginning but never-ending” (2022, p.
x). The more voices that are added to the process, the better.

Thus, scientific expertise can a boon to anarchist societies rather than
a detriment. Instead of seeing science as a monolithic authority,
esoteric and isolated, we can see it as an essential piece for the
survival of a mutually dependent community.

8. No One Is Healthy by Themselves

Health isn’t fully determined by behavior, genetic makeup, or random
chance: it is profoundly shaped through our environments. The social
determinants of health are well-established—working conditions, housing,
social inclusion, access to medical services, and other situational
factors all have a lasting effect on one’s health. Similarly, infectious
disease control, air and water quality, and crisis management all
require community-based solutions. Thus, health is not just a biomedical
issue. It is a collective condition that requires collective approaches
to address.

Public health, at its root, is about populations, not individuals. This
community-centered orientation distinguishes it from clinical medicine,
which is largely individualistic, and situates one’s health within the
larger social fabric. As Mary-Jane Schneider (2020) puts it, “Whereas
medicine is concerned with individual patients, public health regards
the community as its patient” (p. 86). The COVID-19 pandemic brought
this distinction to the forefront of the public’s consciousness—a
person’s risk of becoming ill with the virus didn’t depend only on their
choices, but on whether others wore masks, had paid sick leave, and got
vaccinated. No single person had the power to stop its spread, and this
highlighted the need for population-wide interventions.

9. Care Without Coercion is Possible

Marcus Hill (2009) connects public health with radical values in his pamphlet Fragments of an Anarchist Public Health.
In his view, health politics should ultimately be driven by consensus,
not structured around an authoritarian approach. Instead, a major aim of
public health should be to “encourage individuals to become involved in
collective efforts to improve the structural determinants of their
health” (2009, p. 3). For Hill, a healthy society does depend on health
services. However, equity and participation—values that have been
emphasized in anarchist thought for almost two centuries—can and should
be incorporated into a more inclusive public health approach.

Hill points to several concrete examples of decentralized public health
in action. The Zapatistas organized community-level health services
among the indigenous peoples of Chiapas after the Mexican government
failed to provide support, eventually founding a hospital in 1991 that
runs independently of the state. The Ithaca Health Alliance in Ithaca,
NY provides interest-free loans for individuals to repay medical debt.
The Gesundheit! Institute, founded by Patch Adams, seeks to entirely
redesign the health system in the United States by opposing market-based
models of healthcare delivery. These projects have sought to make
systemic changes by reshaping institutions “along the lines of
participatory social values” (Hill, 2009, p. 5). Along those lines, Hill
advocates for the creation of a healthcare system built around
anarcho-syndicalist concepts, in which federations of local health
groups collaborate to address broad issues in health.

This is only one possible path to a public health that is
anti-authoritarian. Ultimately, health is a commons—it is defined by
whether our neighbors have care, whether our workplaces both equitable
and effective. Though public health has had its failures (sometimes
spectacular ones) and has been host to broad abuses of power, it is
nonetheless necessary to maintain our collective well-being. The key is
to promote non-capitalist and non-centralized forms of public health
that can work within an anarchist system.

10. Understanding Comes from Participation

Science is often associated with detached geniuses, corporate research,
and ivory towers. There are as many different approaches to science as
there are scientists, however: there are curious physicists,
auto-didactic engineers, radical biologists, and indigenous ecologists.
It can be practiced in basements and squats just as well as it is
practiced in laboratories and clinics. Rather than treating it as the
enemy, I encourage anarchists to see the radical potential of science
and become scientists themselves.

Sources