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.
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.