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.
In short, MLs do not seek socialism because they are utopians or because socialism would be more moral; they seek socialism because it will resolve the contradictions of capitalism, according to the scientific world outlook of Dialectical Materialism.
There are lots of scientists who openly and actively applied dialectical materialism to natural sciences. E.g. Peter Medawar. (Great writer, by the way, and he has lots of short articles available online. Some on Marxists.org IIRC.)
Marxism-Leninism is scientific because it applies the scientific method to human relations (we call this application Historical Materialism).
There is more to it than this but this summary is a start. We could have a good debate over this summary and the ‘scientific’ aspect of Marxism-Leninism, so you have asked an excellent question.
You may find it helpful to read Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (short pamphlet) and/ or Anti-Dühring (the full book, longer, but it is quite funny).
Experiments not necessary. Take the hypothesis, ‘lead ingestion is especially harmful to children under 5’. We do not need to give lead to children to test this hypothesis. Children will unfortunately eat lead. Adults, too, will be exposed to lead. If we collect data on patients over time, we can review the data and notice patterns.
Note, I am not a medical doctor and will gladly be corrected on the following example by someone who knows more than me on this issue.
[Edit: see Ayulin’s critique of this example in the comment, below.]
E.g. children with X symptoms tend to have Y milligrammes of lead per millilitre of blood, but adults who come to the emergency room with the same symptoms usually have Z (greater than Y) milligrammes of lead per millilitre of blood. We can guess that lead is more harmful to children because lower exposure is connected to greater harm than in adults. Then we can record new data and see if it supports that hypothesis. Every time new data supports the hypothesis, we can be more confident that it is correct (but only if it is falsifiable).
This notion of ‘confidence factors’ is from Popper’s hypothetico-deductive methodology, btw (Objective Knowledge IIRC). The point is, ‘experiments’ are not really necessary even for Popper. We must record, observe, and analyse data, though. Experiments give us data, but we can get data from elsewhere.
Historical Materialists (Marxist-Leninists) can analyse e.g. economic data. In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin analyses data relating to the size and wealth of companies to highlight a pattern that capitalism tends towards monopoly (fewer and fewer, but bigger and bigger companies). He identifies the average number of employers of companies in one decade, then observes the same for later decades. His thesis is based on what that data shows. We can be confident that Lenin was correct because new data collected today still shows a tendency towards monopoly.
To see Marx do Historical Materialism, have a look at ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’. For a modern example, you could read something by Zac Cope, Bertell Ollman, Michael Parenti, or David Harvey.
If you want a challenge, there’s always Capital,Vol I. And if you’re interested but not ready to tackle the whole book, you could try one of the chapters on primitive accumulation (maybe ‘Bloody Legislation’ (short chapter) or the chapter on the working day (long-enough-to-be-a-short-book chapter)).
Try not to feel overwhelmed with all these sources. If this is all or mostly new to you, begin with the shorter Engels text on Scientific Socialism, above.
Feel free to ask more questions or for clarification.
Does this help?
I don’t fully agree with your example, since an alternate and totally plausible hypothesis would be that in reality they both ingested the same amount of lead and thus have the same symptoms but the child body is just slower at getting rid of lead. This would make it appear as if adults are more tolerant to lead even though both patients were actually exposed to the same amount. It still illustrates the point that not all knowledge as to come from experiments and data collection in the real world can also lead to insights, but I think what my point shows is that experiments still can’t be (easily) replaced. With an in-vitro experiment you could test whether child neurons react differently to lead compared to adult neurons and with that information make an educated guess under the (questionable) assumption that in vitro translates to in vivo. This often holds true but not always. But it is definitely better than being left with the uncertainty that mere data collection results in.
Great point!
I suppose that to help us decide which of the two hypotheses is correct, we could test for lead content in bone and organ samples? And compare x-rays? But…
You have also made me realise something else: I may have set up a false dichotomy within the idea of ‘experiment’. In my example above I imply that an experiment is something (a set of conditions?) that e.g. a scientist sets up. But if we test for lead in blood or other tissue, or compare x-rays, is that not an experiment? Okay, the scientist need not give people lead in the first place, but once patients turn up having ingested lead, what follows may be described as an experiment, no?
You’re still right, I think, to correct me and say that experiments are difficult / impossible to replace. (Well, we could avoid experiments, but we would not get far.)
I think there’s something else to pull out of your observation (continuing with the example above): Marxist-Leninists must still consider different hypotheses for the tendency towards monopoly or consider whether capitalism always tends towards monopoly; and they must ‘experiment’ to see which hypothesis is more accurate / more useful for predictions.
A good example would be Kautsky, arguing that socialists should break up monopolies and use state power to control smaller companies. Lenin rejected this idea, observing that we started with lots of smaller companies and history brought us to imperialism. Those remade smaller companies would again form (secret) cartels and trusts to get an advantage and we would soon be back at imperialism.
Another example is Kwame Nkrumah’s Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. In this book, Nkrumah updates Lenin’s thesis to take account of new data – i.e. showing that imperialists dodged the full contradictions of imperialism by exporting those contradictions to the (ex-)colonies.
Taking this further, and in light of some other comments in this thread, I now also see more clearly that Marxist-Leninists can ‘experiment’ with human relations. For instance today we have data showing that if a communist party plans parts of its economy, we can avoid some of the worst aspects of monopoly and provide e.g. housing, education, and healthcare to all. (For clarity, this does not mean Kautsky was right – it suggests instead that the state can control the monopolies rather than breaking then up.)
Warning: I’m talking about lead in this example as if we were the first people to consider the problem, thinking, how do we know if lead is harmful, and how much is harmful. But we do know lead is harmful! Be very careful with lead!
Be cautious especially with wood and metal paint if it was painted before the 1960s to be safe. Lead is incredibly harmful, especially to children under 6 (I’m told they will keep eating lead paint chips because it is sweet – Romans used it in wine). And except for the body’s ability to get rid of some lead upon ingestion (not much, adults more than children), adults and children absorb lead in bones and it is to my knowledge impossible to remove unless you go straight to the emergency room before it has been absorbed (can take a few days, I think) and take a prescription that can prevent that absorption.
Once the bones are ‘full’, any more lead goes to the organs and eventually the brain, again where it cannot really be removed. At this point, the subject would suffer from organ failure and brain damage. If you are decorating an old house, you can buy lead testing strips. Dip in vinegar, then rub on suspicious paint. If it goes ‘pink’ (read the instructions), do not sand or scrape! Not 100% accurate, but better than nothing.
For anyone in construction, read up on lead poisoning. Plumbers and roofers may come into contact with a lot of lead, for example. Wear gloves and an FFP3 mask and do not eat or drink until you have washed your hands well. (There is a campaign about occupational risks of lead, but it’s not widely known. Probably because preventing the occupational risks would cut into profits.)
I think the important part about experiments is that you control the input variables and measure the output. This is of course the ideal experiment and in the real world you can never account for all input variables. But if the scientist knows how much lead has been ingested this is a controlled variable and therefore even if the scientist did not “feed” the subjects lead as long as they know how much has been ingested it should be considered an experiment.
Of course social experiments are also possible in that sense. Consider the impact of the pandemic for example. We have now obtained data on the way such disruptions influence different economic and political structures. Since we can analyze the virus and the different economic and political structures we can consider the input variables to be (largely) controlled. Thus we need not engineer a virus and spread it to acquire valuable data that can help us when we encounter future catastrophes of a similar kind. Of course this should not imply that the impact of Covid was positive, but rather that we can transform situations that arise into experiments that we can learn from through measurement.
Regarding your first paragraph: while it’s certainly not just based on abstract morality, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that MLs don’t seek socialism for ethical reasons
Definitely. Thanks!