Les Levidow is Senior Research Fellow at the Open University.  In the mid-1970s he participated in US activities around Science for the People magazine. After moving to London, he became Managing Editor of the Radical Science Journal in the 1980s. He is co-founder and Editor of its successor journal, Science as Culture. This essay extends his talk on Chris Knight’s book at University College London (UCL) on 27 February 2018 at a teach-out during the strike of the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU).