SCIENCEANDSOCIETY.COM

If you were wondering when SCIENCE & SOCIETY was going to go electronic -- if ever -- the answer is: with all deliberate speed, emphasis on "deliberate" (a dialectical synthesis of "critical" and "revolutionary"). In short, this is something worth approaching with care, not with a herd mentality. There is a particularly offensive commercial about the Internet on U. S. television, from Cisco Systems, in which children shout at you, in unison: "Are you ready?" The implication is that the e-age is something elemental, independent of human will and judgment, and unalterable: either get on board or be left behind. We, of course, reject this outrageous determinism, and seek out the social relations behind current trends in electronic communication, publishing, education, and commerce. The ideology of inevitability reduces the Web to a handmaiden of the global spread and dominance of capitalism -- the "market," in neoliberal terminology. We should ask, instead, what a socialist Web would look like; how the new technology might be progressively shaped to enhance community and a sense of empowerment, rather than reducing people to point-and-click isolated atoms. But this is a huge question, and no pretense is made to answer it here.

In the meantime, you can check out our new Website: scienceandsociety.com

Note that, despite the miracles of the Web and html, a site name (url) cannot use an ampersand, let along the special SCIENCE & SOCIETY ampersand (see "Editorial Perspectives," Winter 1997-1998); so we are stuck with "scienceandsociety" (one word).

In its initial stages, the site only has information that is readily available to readers of the journal: a home page describing who we are and what we do (text essentially taken from our inside front cover); a listing of the Editorial Board and Board of Contributing Editors; instructions for contributors; information for subscribers, with a link to the Guilford Publications Website; the current issue's Table of Contents; and the current issue's "Editorial Perspectives." Later on, we hope to add some archived Tables of Contents, and perhaps even an Index, so that readers can search for materials of special interest. This is an evolving project, and anyone with suggestions should contact us: email to scsjj@cunyvm.cuny.edu, or even use the hopelessly 20th-century media of telephones and snailmail. The site will be kept current; we promise that it will not degenerate into a cobwebsite.

Will S&S eventually become an on-line publication? There is no way to know for sure. Given the present state of formating and downloading technologies, electronic publications do not offer readers a uniform and stable product, as regards visual style, pagination, reproduction of graphics, tables, math, etc. Exact citation is therefore made difficult, if not impossible. Since we believe we offer something of value to the permanent record, we will continue to publish in solid form for the forseeable future. This is yet another example of the dangers inherent in any rush to electronics: it results in a certain "ephemeralization," a loss of permanence for which the Cisco children might want to know whether we will be "ready."

A final thought. We smile a bit at having a "dot com" address, like millions of large and small entrepreneurs. Some might think that "Marxism dot com" is an oxymoron. Note, however, that the prefix "com," from Latin, means "together"; it appears in the Latin "comedere," to eat together, which links to both the English "eat" and the Spanish "comer" (an instance of non-obvious cognate status that illustrates the principle of the ultimate inter-relatedness of all human languages). "Com" is generally taken, and undoubtedly intended, to refer to "commercial," or "company," but it could just as well stand for "communal," or "communicate," or even (heaven forfend) "communist"! This simply repeats our observation about non-inevitability: there are multiple ways to bring people together.

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ANNETTE AT NINETY

As many readers will know, Dr. Annette T. Rubinstein turned 90 this year. Annette is our senior colleague, in every sense of the word. She joined the S&S Editorial Board in the early 1960s, when most of the rest of us were still in college (or yet to attend), and at a time when she had already compiled a long and distinguished career as scholar, teacher, and political activist.

Mary Boger, of the Brecht Forum in New York, has written a wonderful appreciation of Annette's life and work, and she has kindly consented to our publishing it here. I want only to add a few words specifically about Annette and SCIENCE & SOCIETY.

I wish I could convey to everyone who has not experienced it the sense of personal enrichment one gets from Annette's contributions to our deliberations. She draws spontaneously on a vast store of literary knowledge -- from Shakespeare to Balzac, from Victor Hugo to Josephine Herbst -- as well as on a deep grasp of history. Annette offers those she works with a wonderful intellectual feast: food for thought, often complemented by food of the more material variety when meetings are held at her home. But she also brings to the table a rich personal history of struggle: for the progressive labor movement, with ahead-of-their-time political leaders such as Congressman Vito Marcantonio, against racism and repression, for the rights of prisoners, and above all for education and enlightenment.

Annette has played a major part in shaping SCIENCE & SOCIETY's evolving sense of identity. She has always opposed reduction of scholarship to slogans. She has insisted throughout her long career on drawing upon the strengths and potentials of various trends on the left and schools of thought within Marxism, often at a time when she was the only link among them. Our sense of the essential unity of Marxism and of its ties with the real history of people's movement and struggle simply would not be what it is without her.

Her commitment and energy remain intact, even as she enters "the last decade of her first century" (to borrow from the title of an essay by W. E. B. Du Bois, to which Annette drew my attention). I know our readers join us in wishing her the happiest of birthdays, and all good wishes for her contributions to our joint effort in the years ahead.

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SKETCH OF A VIBRANT LIFE

Annette T. Rubinstein was born in 1910 in New York City into a family of immigrant Jewish Socialists. She became an active socialist in 1934 and that commitment has sustained her to this day. Annette is a rare combination of teacher, scholar and political organizer. She has been in the forefront of the important political struggles of the last 75 years, exemplifying Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s maxim that ". . . it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged never to have lived."

Annette certainly does not stand at peril of being judged not to have lived as attested to by her eighteen and a half pound FBI file which she acquired under the Freedom of Information Act in the 1980s. Her life has been colored by strong passions -- for freedom and social justice, for literature, for teaching. Annette has shared the passions and actions of all the major working class, anti-racist, political and social movements of the 20th century and continues to do so as we enter the 21st. Her life has been intertwined with the lives of other important figures of the American radical movements. People such as Paul Robeson, Dorothy Parker, and W. E. B. DuBois have been among her allies and her friends.

Annette has been a consummate political person all her life. She worked with the Spanish Refugee Committee during the late 1930s and 1940s, joined in the mass working-class upheavals of the 1930s, and was a member of the Communist Party USA until 1952. She was blacklisted during the McCarthy period and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee three times. Earlier she was subjected to institutionalized anti-Semitism, when after being accepted to Barnard College as an undergraduate at the age of 15, she was subsequently told there had been a mistake regarding her application since the Jewish quota had already been filled. Instead she went to New York University. Fortunately, by 1929, the previous barriers had been broken and she entered Columbia University as a graduate student of philosophy. She went on to receive her Ph.D. in 1933.

Annette has been a lifelong supporter of independent socialist politics. She served as an organizer of the American Labor Party between 1936 and 1954, working closely with Congressman Vito Marcantonio. In 1950 she ran for congress on the American Labor Party ticket against the Liberal Party's candidate, FDR Jr. In 1958 she ran with Corliss Lamont, Jack McManus, Captain Hugh Mulzac, and Scott Grey, Esq., in a New York State gubernatorial campaign that brought together for the first time socialists of various tendencies, under the auspices of the United Independent Socialist Party. She ran for New York State lieutenant governor. Annette compiled selections of Marcantonio's writings and wrote his political biography as an introduction to the book she edited, entitled I Vote My Conscience. In 1992 she was awarded the first Marcantonio Award.

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