Read this: I don’t want this to turn into a struggle session so please do not engage in such a way.
Does Marxism being “scientific” matter? Or does this need to want to cling to science to prove its legitimacy actually hinder its effect? I’ve been wrestling with this question for the past day and I still don’t have a concrete opinion.
It being “scientific” is less about matching the scientific method as we were taught in school. It’s meant to differentiate it from utopian socialism (e.g. everyone will be equal with infinite food and resources) and idealism (e.g. great men changed history because he was a very good speaker). Scientific socialism, or Marxism, is supposed to be grounded in reality, e.g. the world is influenced by many things, but primarily what people need and how those needs are produced and met. That being said, we still observe Marxist critiques, observations, and methods being “replicable” throughout history.
In addition, Sociologists still use Marxist theories and methods in everything but name because they’re simply the best, and even the smarter capitalists use Marxist analysis to help generate profit because Marx’s work was largely about explaining how capitalism works and fails.
And yes, it does matter. We have instances of people who claim to be Marxists and yet fall to unscientific, utopian visions and committed atrocities because of it. For example, Shining Path, Pol Pot, PatSocs/MAGA communism, and various Maoist cults. Some of these were indeed western intelligence plots such as Pol Pot and the GLADIO fascist maoism movement, but the point is that without adhering to the scientific foundations, you are left with gibberish recitations of writers with little substance in practice. Not to mention, you will fall to the liberal recuperation of history and figures.
Another more light hearted example would be The Boondocks. Great show, but even though the main character is a communist and portrayed as the smartest one, the show still paints ‘bad culture’ as the driving force of society.
I appreciate the thoughtful reply
I think its worth pointing out that, as far as I understand it, the “scientific” part of Marx/Engel’s project does refer directly to the scientific method. Their goal was to establish certain universal, empirically-derived (in other words, scientific) laws of historical development which could then be applied to understand the rise and eventual fall of capitalism. In fact, in one of his intros to socialism: utopian and scientific Engels actually mentions Darwin, as well as LaPlace, as precursors to their project. Which gets to the real differentiation they attempted to make between themselves and the “utopians”: Its not that these socialists believed in some magical society where everyone always gets along, its essentially that they attempted to resist the development of capitalism, to slow it down and essentially “opt out” of it by establishing non-capitalism communes and projects within a broader capitalist economy. Marx and Engels attempted to surpass these socialists by demonstrating that human civilization followed certain laws of development (increasing productive abilities and organization, intensifying class struggle / simplifying class structures, etc.) which meant capitalism could not be “opted out” of or resisted, only eclipsed by a new mode of production. Which is all well and good, but leads to some difficult problems when you really start looking at the necessary conclusions. There are of course other aspects of Marx’s work that are really admirable and useful, but their whole project of making a science of history or revolution seems like a false start
Science is an effort to understand the laws of motion and processes of change, describing them in a naturalistic rather than metaphysical way.
Marxism is a social science that describes the process of change in human society, viewing political change as motion in a historical process.
Marxism is also a political critique, revealing and assessing modern power and politics by stripping them of their idealisms and putting them into their historical context, unmasking their brutality and injustice.
Revolutionary Marxism takes this understanding of change as a product of certain natural laws of human society, and then seeks to transcend them in the same way the human understanding of evolution or agriculture can be used to transcend certain evils of the natural world.
You can take Marxism as a science or as a critique, it’s both.
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Marxism only has validity to me over other ideologies because it’s a scientisation of philosophy and philosophisation of science. It should be an interface between the two that provides the extra contextual lenses for an observation or idea, while also challenging your initial perception of that thing to remove any idealism or vulgar materialism from your critique. Every idea I write has to make sense in the greater body of ideas I know to be the least-wrong interpretation of the world and it has to stand up to the peer review of other communists doing that thing. While Marxism isn’t a science in itself, like horticulture or ecology I’m drawn to it because it’s the most interdisciplinary attempt at applying a scientific worldview to a wildly complex system. I’m always considering the extra intersectional angles and checking to see that what I believe as a Marxist is what I believe as a scientist to refine both.
Not only is it scientific, not only is it science, it is the scientific method. Or rather, Marxism (dialectical materialism) as a philosophy contains the scientific method - as a justified part of a whole philosophy, rather than a free-floating ‘neat idea’ as it is for capitalist scientists.
To a dialectical materialist, the only way to understand the world, i.e. develop a theory about it, is through practice in the world. Practice and theory form an inseparable dialectical union. Make a theory, test it in practice, revise the theory, revise the tests, iterate again and again until you can fully describe the phenomenon you’re studying.
Marx and Engels expressed this as part of the philosophy of dialectical materialism, an advancement beyond Hegel’s dialectical idealism, and then used these methods to study economic relations and the society that results from them. But dialectical materialism goes beyond the theories of political economy that Marx developed using it, even if the search for answers about political economy was what caused Marx to develop it in the first place.
If this formula (theorize, test, theorize) seems completely obvious as the only way to generate knowledge about the world, it’s only because most competing philosophies of knowledge have fallen by the wayside. But even so, this is not actually the dominant understanding in the world today, because all bourgeoise science eventually has to blind itself to reality, smudge its own results and ignore the real explanations of phenomena in order to justify its own existence. And even when scientists do manage to follow this method, either through principle or in a field that capitalist ideology doesn’t need to corrupt, an understanding of dialectics gives it a much deeper and richer meaning.
Only under dialectical materialism, the proper philosophy of the working class, is true science even possible. And the results speak for themselves, because an advantage in creating true knowledge about the world gives an advantage in controlling the phenomena of the world, so throughout history, socialist nations have made strides in scientific progress, matched by strides in industial progress, far in advance of what the capitalists can achieve.
Only under dialectical materialism, the proper philosophy of the working class, is true science even possible
This I fully believe even if I don’t consider Marxism itself to be a formal standalone science. Bourgeois science is inherently corrupted by bourgeois interests. The studies we choose to fund, the publication and interpretation of those results, the walled garden and hyper-competitive culture of academia- there are so many ways science as an idea is impossible to be realised through science as a bourgeois institution. Marxist revolution is a prerequisite to science being something universal, democratic, and liberating. Science should be something everyone can participate in and benefit from.
Marxism doesn’t have a “need to cling to” science. It simply is scientific in its nature. The lack of materialism in other ideologies is why they are broken.
If you ask a Marxist what they believe they will give you a concrete answer with definitive and measurable outcomes eg. public ownership of the means of production.
If you ask a liberal they give you undefinable, unmeasurable, and/or contradicting plans like freedom, equality, protection of personal property.
Define “freedom” How can people be free if they are not free to take other peoples property? How can everyone be equal if some people have all the stuff and aren’t forced to give some of it away? These ideals can not be upheld because they are undefined.
Imo Marxism should be understood as scientific but not a true science.
People get caught up in defending or debunking the idea of Marxism as a science. It’s not physics, it never will be and that’s okay. Lots of things are scientific without being a science, depending on exactly how you choose to draw those boundaries, and in fact a lot of the soft science is scientific without necessarily being a science. But what soft sciences can yield with regards to information and insight and analysis is still invaluable and irreplaceable, even if it isn’t on the same tier as chemistry.
Usually when people try to debunk Marxism as a science they are either paraphrasing the Popperian critique of Marxism or they are regurgitating someone else’s paraphrasing of the Popperian critique. If anyone ever starts talking falsifiability in a discussion of Marxism and its scientific approach you can immediately discount this person because this is a trash argument; plenty of things that exist squarely within the domains of hard science are not falsifiable themselves and plenty of things that are a part of science happened outside of the scientific method. So basically by Popper attempting to exclude Marxism (and psychoanalysis) from his definition of science, he made it so narrow as to exclude large swathes of science itself. If someone wants to pick that particular hill to die on then that’s their prerogative but doing so makes that person more anti-science than the person who considers Marxism as a true science imo.
But this is all an inherently negative project. Marxism holds a lot of descriptive and predictive power. Like anything to do with people and politics and economics, it’s never going to be absolute and it’s always going to be messy and whatever you use to analyse this stuff will necessarily be incomplete and imperfect. But the negative project of attempting to disprove Marxism being scientific/a science isn’t about improving upon it or contributing to how it analyses the word, instead it’s just an attempt to undermine or negate the importance people place on Marxism by gatekeeping and trying to cast it as being undeserving of the prestige that scientific endeavours are given.
If you want to head off a discussion that is going this direction you can foreshadow them being about to discard a large part of the sciences, as mentioned above, or you can ask the person if there are any aspects of Marxism that are scientific to draw out their ignorance on the topic or you can ask them how they think Marxism could become more scientific. This usually stumps the anti-Marxists.
But ultimately Marxism doesn’t need to be a true science to be scientific and it doesn’t need to be a true science in order to be an extremely valuable way of analysing the world so I generally don’t bother with discussions about whether or not Marxism is a science because the majority of people who want a debate on these matters have near-zero awareness of philosophy of science so the discussion amounts to watching someone wade around in the shallow end while they play pretend and convince themselves that they have some epic gotcha when really they don’t.
Not trying to imply that this is what you’re are doing right here in your post but it’s something that’s pretty common amongst critics of Marxism. It’s a bit like people who argue that Marx’s approach was based on an incomplete or a flawed anthropology. That might well be true and I’m very interested in hearing the critiques of Marx’s anthropological foundation but just because the starting point was wrong or inaccurate doesn’t mean that where it goes and what conclusions Marx draws are therefore equally as flawed or false.
To illustrate this point a little bit, imagine if I encountered a car for the first time in my life and I pulled the engine apart and studied how it functions to conclude that there must be microscopic gremlins that push the pistons which create the force that cause the driveshaft to rotate which transfers the energy to eventually propel the wheels into motion. Obviously the starting point of my analysis is completely incorrect and it’s downright unscientific in the most extreme way. But my understanding of the mechanical principles of what happens beyond the cylinders is accurate. This means that we can improve my theory but it doesn’t mean that every conclusion I arrive at after the microscopic gremlins is therefore as incorrect as my starting point is.
Great comment. That final paragraph headed me off asking what to say about Marxism being founded on faulty premises in a reductio ad absurdum kind of way.
Could you give us some examples of the following, please, particularly of the first kind?
of things that exist squarely within the domains of hard science [but] are not falsifiable themselves and plenty of things that are a part of science happened outside of the scientific method.
Basically all of astrophysics “suffers” from the falsifiability problem – yes, careful observation can yield results that parallel falsifiability but you can’t really create a circumstance where all the variables are accounted for in order to establish falsifiability in astrophysics; it’s not like you can blow up the moon just to prove that it affects the tides on earth or to create a second universe to tinker around in, you know?
Sciences like evolutionary biology and geology do not confine themselves strictly to the scientific method as it’s not possible to apply this to all areas of these sciences by their very nature. (Sure, you can do a lot with fruit flies or microbes but it’s not possible to apply the scientific method to extinct animals and to our ancestors from thousands or millions of years ago.)
There are plenty of examples of scientific discoveries that occur accidentally and I think it’s fair to argue that Darwin’s theory of evolution falls outside of the strict definition of scientific method as he had plenty of observations but he didn’t observe these changes directly but merely the end result of these changes, so it’s something that sits outside/alongside the scientific method rather than fitting neatly within it.
I know that what I’m saying could be interpreted as a very naive dismissal or rejection of science because this comment gives the appearance of me undermining or denying the validity of science but that’s really not the case at all even though you can hear these arguments from, say, more sophisticated creationist charlatans who point out that there are parts of evolutionary biology that are not falsifiable and then go on to argue that therefore it’s not a science but a myth and blah blah blah. My argument is the polar opposite though. Evolutionary biology has a staggering degree of descriptive and predictive power despite having one foot outside the strictest definition of science but that means that either the way that we define science is faulty or there are factors that exist outside of that definition which are critical to the existence of science, not that there’s something wrong with evolutionary biology or that we should discredit it. There’s the famous case of biologist Richard Alexander predicting the existence of naked mole rats with remarkable precision based purely on extrapolation and hypothesising, for example. There’s no denying that this sort of extrapolation is one of the best ways to vindicate evolutionary biology, outside of what we are capable of directly observing with short-lived organisms.
So if we were to be strict about how we apply labels, what Richard Alexander did was undeniably scientific however it wasn’t itself science. And I think that Marxism is very much like this. Moreover, Marxism is not doctrinaire. People can be dogmatic Marxists or class-reductionist, sure, but there are plenty of examples of people being dogmatic about a science as well and that doesn’t disprove the science itself it simply shows that people are fallible. Again, this is another thing that anti-science people point to and they try to frame a scientific discipline as being static and fully realised so then if someone is being dogmatic about science they use that to claim that therefore something is fundamentally wrong with science itself. Meanwhile, scientific debates are an everyday occurrence, they are often heated, and it’s not uncommon for there to be factions that battle out different hypotheses amongst themselves because a major aspect of science is its ability to incorporate new information and to adjust to changes in how things are understood and framed, and these debates are a major part of this process. In a similar vein, Marx would have been looking to Britain, Germany, and the US for revolution to occur based on his analysis. Then we see that the antagonisms between classes in these most industrialised countries being transposed onto other countries, essentially overcoming the factors that hemmed in capitalism within that nation’s borders without actually resolving them because they were effectively outsourced to other countries. And that’s where Marxists observe this phenomenon and they develop a theory of imperialism that accounts for these new developments and which points to the existence of different fault lines within the capitalist world order that are vindicated by later revolutions as it proves that revolutions are more likely to occur in the countries where capitalism is weakest, in the margins of the hegemony of global capitalism, rather than simply happening in the most developed countries.
So Marxism incorporates this and develops onwards, and to me that is sufficient to call Marxism scientific because it makes observations about history and the present, it collects data about what is going on, it creates a theory based on those observations, this is extrapolated out into hypotheses, we observe whether those hypotheses are in line with what society produces, we debate the results and the causes, and where there are outlier events like revolutions occurring in countries like Russia and China and Vietnam we go back over our observations and hypotheses to adapt to this new information. Or at least some of us do anyway lol. And the same can be said of tactics and strategies for the ol’ educate/agitate/organise - most Marxists aren’t following the Bolshevik revolution as if it were a step-by-step process but rather it’s about identifying the similarities and the differences then applying the lessons from historical revolutions to bring about the next one however we can.
That’s sufficient to call it a scientific approach in my mind. If you want to call it a science and to take a broader definition of what science is then I’m not gonna object to that. As far as I’m concerned the debate over whether Marxism is itself a science is a lot like a border dispute - people are arguing over what lies within a territory and what falls outside of it. This can be a productive discussion but I’m much more interested in examining the topography of the map than discussing the borders because that’s what yields the most important information and it has the most direct relevance to application imo.
Thanks for this write up. It was useful and helped me think through some theoretical problems that I couldn’t get my head around.
It’s probably not a science, using a falsifiability criterion for “science”. (See Popper.) I don’t think that’s controversial – Marxist informed hypotheses could be tested and discarded perhaps, not Marxism itself.
Because it’s more than that. It’s a explanatory model, it’s a body of knowledge, with core normative concerns and areas of study. It is, god forbid, a practice; it isn’t a disembodied law which regulates the world unarticulated, but which has been apprehended at a particular historical moment, and which motivates and creates a World precisely because it has been apprehended and articulated. (I would conceive of this as it’s dialectical character.)
It’s not poorer for this; its just a different kind of thing.
I'd be curious to read anyone's opinions on a traditional, Hegelian inflected Marxism with "analytic Marxism" (I've not read Cohen; I wonder if he tries to "ground" Marxism in more "common sensical" empiricism, and whether this makes it more similar to falsifiable science).lol this is more or less what I was trying to say but much more clear and concise. I think you’re absolutely right: Marxism is a methodology, and one that has to be applied differently at different places and times to be effective. Its a tactical mistake to think of it as a science
Ty and well said. Any concision is just the result/blessing of my not having had engaged w/ Theory in a long time.
Define “matter”
Important.
Could we talk about Marxism as a system of ideas about how a society functions without referring to it as a science.
I guess another framing of the question is what value does referring to it as a science add?
It depends on the context.
Science is our way of observing the patterns in reality and making predictions based on those observations.
If you want to use Marxist theory to test, replicate, and predict/plan for the future then, then yes, it is important.
If you mean “How important is it to our goals of achieving communism” then that’s complicated. Scientific communism is very useful for predicting things like how your boss/landlord/ruling class will act. However, if you mean “Is it important when selling communism to others” that’s even more complicated, as that depends on who you are talking to. For example, the reason I’m a communist is because it makes sense to me from an ecological standpoint. I see it as the only way our species will survive and thrive and I base that on what I understand about communism and the natural world. So if you’re trying to convince someone that has a material world view, it is pretty important.
Hell, half the reason we say capitalism will inevitably fail is because when you make predictions based on the patterns we see in nature, empires, environment, it becauses evident that capitalism cannot continue indefinitely because it quite literally requires more resources than our planet can sustain and it sucks at doing anything other than consuming. It will lead to our extinction. It fails at predicting and meeting the challenges our species faces, and so it will be made obselete or we will die.
imo treating it as a science does more to hurt the purpose of Marxism than it helps
marx and engel’s project was originally conceived as a science in the true sense of the word, in the way we would consider physics or biology to be a science. But forcing abstract, universal laws (something which is essential to science) onto human civilization and development is extremely difficult, if not impossible to do in a productive way. More to the point, even within a single mode of production, the actual conditions on the ground at any given point will differ enormously, so any general doctrine will either lead you in the wrong direction or be abstracted to the point of being useless. Therefore, its more useful to think of Marxism as a methodology, not a science. Treating it this way keeps you in tune with the needs of the current place and time, and less focused on what should be happening according to abstract laws.
In addition, treating it as a science has the negative side of downplaying the moral force of socialism. No one I’ve met is socialist because they’ve been convinced by Marx’s syllogism showing the inevitable decline of capitalism and rise of socialism. Rather, when you get down to it, people are socialists because they believe it to be the only way to create an ethical society. It is this moral force that represents the single greatest strength of any left politics, tbh. Treating Marxism as a science necessarily means you have to devalue that aspect.
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marx and engel’s project was originally conceived as a science in the true sense of the word, in the way we would consider physics or biology to be a science. But forcing abstract, universal laws (something which is essential to science) onto human civilization and development is extremely difficult, if not impossible to do in a productive way.
That’s where it’s uniquely suited to my scientific work. As far as I’ve read, there are only three formally declared laws in Marx/Engels’ work which Engels ascribed to dialectical materialism: the transformation of quantity into quality, the interpenetration of opposites, and the negation of the negation. Using Marxism as an analytical tool in my scientific work, those three laws are essential considerations. I have to understand why something is the way it is and what changing a variable will do to it and everything it interacts with. Using Marxism as my overall ontological system, they mesh perfectly with my scientific worldview. Everything is a dynamic subject in a greater ecosystem bound to thermodynamics. I can’t take an idea from Capital and apply it 1:1 as a law of modern economics, but goddamn their philosophical work holds up beautifully in the natural sciences and is only hamstrung by being the first real attempt at studying those things in a radical way.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think we may agree more than you think: the laws you mention aren’t laws in the scientific sense of the word; instead, they’re a technique (dialectics) for investigating the world. I agree that it is a very powerful technique, that’s what I meant when I said that Marxism is best thought of as a methodology than a science. You said it yourself when you called Marxism “an analytical tool”. You can use it to do science, but its not a science per se
Science is the business of trying to identify and systematize patterns in how the world changes over time. Marxism does that, and I think the emphasis on “how the world changes over time” dovetails nicely with dialectical materialism itself. That said, lots of other things are also attempting to identify the same thing (to a greater or lesser degree of success), so I don’t think it’s an incredibly precise descriptor. “Good science or bad science?” is much more informative than “science or not-science?” The demarcation problem is just bullshit.
