We say that Marxism is scientific for various reasons. At the surface level, marxism adapts as new knowledge is discovered and learns from past experiences. It’s not an ideology set in stone like others are.
But first to understand what we mean by marxism I’ll refer to Lenin’s three sources and components of marxism : dialectical materialism, the economic theory (Labour-theory of value namely) and the class struggle. These three together make marxism.
For example if you look at religion (the only example that came to my head, though some people would disagree to call religion an ideology), they have a foundation story: Jesus was born in the year 0, he was the son of God sent to Earth to absolve us of our sins, and that’s the story that founded Christianism. Christians have precepts to follow from a book that was written 2000 years ago and has not changed since then. The way we interpret the Bible has changed (for example in the story about how Jesus heals a blind man, some might say one is not necessarily literally blind in the eyes), but the stories themselves are still the same. The precepts are still the same: follow the ten commandments, and if you’re a protestant it’s important to have a work ethic.
Marxism on the other hand doesn’t have a foundational story. It doesn’t have precepts outside of the three components we saw above. And even then, dialectical materialism doesn’t mean “the world works like this, we interpret this event to mean this and that’s it, you can’t change this”. Dialectical materialism is a way to look at the world and understand what happened and what is happening, but of course it can’t predict the future. We can’t really know who will be elected as president of the USA in 2024 but once we’ll live in 2024 and see the elected candidate, we’ll be able to use dialectical materialism to understand why it happened like it did.
So essentially marxism evolves with the material conditions the people find themselves in. If you’re somewhat familiar with liberalism, our criticism of it is that it was born in a time of high contradictions and sought to resolve only those contradictions. You had the Old Regime – the kings and nobles that kept the serves under their boot – and the upcoming bourgeoisie, who wanted to exploit the serves for themselves. So they had all these great ideas about how everyone is an individual, how everyone is different and has fundamental rights because they were born a human and that is enough to guarantee them some protections.
But then it turns out your unalienable rights are only privilege extended by the bourgeoisie, and certainly the people in the Middle East being bombed by our humanist and liberal politicians don’t seem to have any unalienable rights. So liberalism is prescriptive.
Marxism makes no such claims, it’s merely descriptive. Whether dialectical materialism, the LTV, or the class struggle (and theory of the state), it’s all a description inferred from what marxism actually says. This means in 2000 years, the class struggle will still be applicable (provided we still live in class society by then).
And that’s very scientific. Science obeys to rules. To make a proper scientific experiment, you have to find a control group. You have to record all results no matter if they agree with you or not. An experiment starts with a hypothesis (does this happen if I do that), and then you test it out (with your double blind experiment and everything), and finally you learn from the result (yes, my hypothesis was correct or no, it was incorrect). You look at the world around you and go into the details to understand how exactly things work.
Marxism is very similar. However, there’s one thing we musn’t forget, and it’s that marxism is a way of looking at the world that applies to our current times. It’s very possible that in 200 years, we’ll refine marxism (like how materialism resulted from idealism, and dialectical materialism resulted from metaphysical materialism of the 18th century) even more and call it something else. But it’s doubtful we’ll “go back” to something that existed before marxism, say liberalism. Just like there are no serious feudalists (even monarchists don’t want to go back to feudalism) in the age of liberalism. Because marxism, for our material conditions, answers our questions and is the superior model to explain the world. We’ll see in 200 or 300 years when our material conditions have evolved even more.
In a more precise way we could talk about how materialism is a “reflection” of sorts to science as it grew with it, and idealism is the non-scientific view of the world thriving on our relative ignorance, but I think that’s secondary.
We say that Marxism is scientific for various reasons. At the surface level, marxism adapts as new knowledge is discovered and learns from past experiences. It’s not an ideology set in stone like others are.
But first to understand what we mean by marxism I’ll refer to Lenin’s three sources and components of marxism : dialectical materialism, the economic theory (Labour-theory of value namely) and the class struggle. These three together make marxism.
For example if you look at religion (the only example that came to my head, though some people would disagree to call religion an ideology), they have a foundation story: Jesus was born in the year 0, he was the son of God sent to Earth to absolve us of our sins, and that’s the story that founded Christianism. Christians have precepts to follow from a book that was written 2000 years ago and has not changed since then. The way we interpret the Bible has changed (for example in the story about how Jesus heals a blind man, some might say one is not necessarily literally blind in the eyes), but the stories themselves are still the same. The precepts are still the same: follow the ten commandments, and if you’re a protestant it’s important to have a work ethic.
Marxism on the other hand doesn’t have a foundational story. It doesn’t have precepts outside of the three components we saw above. And even then, dialectical materialism doesn’t mean “the world works like this, we interpret this event to mean this and that’s it, you can’t change this”. Dialectical materialism is a way to look at the world and understand what happened and what is happening, but of course it can’t predict the future. We can’t really know who will be elected as president of the USA in 2024 but once we’ll live in 2024 and see the elected candidate, we’ll be able to use dialectical materialism to understand why it happened like it did.
So essentially marxism evolves with the material conditions the people find themselves in. If you’re somewhat familiar with liberalism, our criticism of it is that it was born in a time of high contradictions and sought to resolve only those contradictions. You had the Old Regime – the kings and nobles that kept the serves under their boot – and the upcoming bourgeoisie, who wanted to exploit the serves for themselves. So they had all these great ideas about how everyone is an individual, how everyone is different and has fundamental rights because they were born a human and that is enough to guarantee them some protections.
But then it turns out your unalienable rights are only privilege extended by the bourgeoisie, and certainly the people in the Middle East being bombed by our humanist and liberal politicians don’t seem to have any unalienable rights. So liberalism is prescriptive.
Marxism makes no such claims, it’s merely descriptive. Whether dialectical materialism, the LTV, or the class struggle (and theory of the state), it’s all a description inferred from what marxism actually says. This means in 2000 years, the class struggle will still be applicable (provided we still live in class society by then).
And that’s very scientific. Science obeys to rules. To make a proper scientific experiment, you have to find a control group. You have to record all results no matter if they agree with you or not. An experiment starts with a hypothesis (does this happen if I do that), and then you test it out (with your double blind experiment and everything), and finally you learn from the result (yes, my hypothesis was correct or no, it was incorrect). You look at the world around you and go into the details to understand how exactly things work.
Marxism is very similar. However, there’s one thing we musn’t forget, and it’s that marxism is a way of looking at the world that applies to our current times. It’s very possible that in 200 years, we’ll refine marxism (like how materialism resulted from idealism, and dialectical materialism resulted from metaphysical materialism of the 18th century) even more and call it something else. But it’s doubtful we’ll “go back” to something that existed before marxism, say liberalism. Just like there are no serious feudalists (even monarchists don’t want to go back to feudalism) in the age of liberalism. Because marxism, for our material conditions, answers our questions and is the superior model to explain the world. We’ll see in 200 or 300 years when our material conditions have evolved even more.
In a more precise way we could talk about how materialism is a “reflection” of sorts to science as it grew with it, and idealism is the non-scientific view of the world thriving on our relative ignorance, but I think that’s secondary.