I’ve always heard my comrades insist that Marxism-Leninism is scientific. I understand how dialectical materialism is scientific, and I understand that Marxism-Leninism is rooted in dialectical materialism. For a while, that satisfied me, but lately I’ve been reading material about how Marxists might present falsifiable hypotheses which made me realize I don’t understand how this works at all.
How do I, a Marxist, go about studying society scientifically in a way that dovetails nicely with dialectical materialism? Do I have to do experiments? What does that look like? How will I know if I’m wrong? Examples would help.
That’s very helpful, but I was hoping you’d address my question about “falsifiable hypotheses.” For context, I was reading an article debunking Karl Popper’s claim that Marxism peddles in unfalsifiable, unscientific claims.
Def read Engels socialism: Utopian and Scientific as a start. But just to see how Marxist economics adheres to scientific method of falsifiability, while bourgeois / marginal utility theory economics doesn’t check out this 2-vid series by Paul Cockshott.
It focuses on how one of the pillars of capitalist economics, the supply and demand curve, is completely unfalsifiable and unproven, while the labor theory of value is both falsifiable and proven.
Useful video, Muad’Dibber.
Your comment reminds me that Popper implies (argues? – it’s been a while since I read him and don’t have an exact quote / reference) that ‘social science’ is not ‘real’ science because it is generally unfalsifiable. He may be right about a lot of bourgeois social science. The mistake is conflating Marxist with bourgeois social science.
Ya that’s true. There is a lot in social sciences that is falsifiable, and sciences like physics also have a lot of stochastic systems with high degrees of uncertainty and variability. Popper really let his ideology get in the way of his better ideas.
Have you read anything by Alan Sokal? He wrote a book called Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. Tbh I never finished it because I thought the premise was a bit unethical at the time. He and Jean Bricmont wrote and published loads of articles in prestigious postmodernist journals. But they made up the science and the maths, suggesting that science is regularly abuse e.g. by people citing Lacan and Derrida favourably. I might dig it out and have another look.
Pity about Popper. Oh well.
Did you see this thread on falsifiability and Marxism?
Edit: the actual link might help: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/305196
Yeah that was my post lol, maybe I should take another look at that
Haha. Damn, I even checked the name of the OP (i.e. you) for that thread before I replied to you here, but I had ‘Ayulin’ in my head as I had just replied to slither comment above.
You’re asking good questions, though, so keep it up!