How scientific is scientific socialism?

[A.R.Amistad]

simple question. I have a general idea of how scientific socialism is scientific, particularly in the anthropological field, but I was wondering if we could divulge into this more. Also, I am coming to think that Marxism is more of a science and a political-economic theory, and less a "philosophy" in the traditional sense.

[The Vegan Marxist]

Have you studied Dialectical-Materialism yet? If not, then that would be a nice start to get into when it comes to the scientific approach towards the Socialistic-ideals pertained by Marx & Engels.

[Muzk]

Have you studied Dialectical-Materialism yet? If not, then that would be a nice start to get into when it comes to the scientific approach towards the Socialistic-ideals pertained by Marx & Engels.

Cut Marx out. Also, dialectics are confusing and crazy as hell.

Scientific socialism is scientific because of this:

Scientific method refers to a body of techniques (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_technique) for investigating phenomena (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenon), acquiring new knowledge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge), or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquiry) must be based on gathering observable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable), empirical (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical) and measurable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement) evidence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence) subject to specific principles of reasoning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasoning).[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#cite_note-0) A scientific method consists of the collection of data (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data) through observation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observation) and experimentation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiment), and the formulation and testing of hypotheses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotheses)Therefore, the theory "walks" alongside the revolutionary practice, changes according to the change of the material conditions.

[Spawn of Stalin]

Stalin wrote a very good summery of dialectical and historical materialism for inclusion in the History of the CPSU(b) short course which was pften the first thing students at the International Lenin School studied so it's not too taxing and fairly short.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm

[The Vegan Marxist]

Cut Marx out. Also, dialectics are confusing and crazy as hell.

Scientific socialism is scientific because of this:
Therefore, the theory "walks" alongside the revolutionary practice, changes according to the change of the material conditions.

I don't see how dialectics are confusing nor crazy. They're simply there to give a scientific outlook on what a certain object is, not to give meaning, in which many mistakenly think dialectics do which is what brings confusion at times. The meaning behind the objects observed through dialectics are not made through dialectical-observation, itself, but is given by humans.

[Muzk]

I'm outta this thread... stalinist hijack

[The Vegan Marxist]

I'm outta this thread... stalinist hijack

Bye Trotsky. :trotski:

[mikelepore]

I think the term "scientific socialism" is misunderstood. It's meant to contrast with the earlier trend of "utopian socialism", which was based on some combination of advising people to think differently (love one another) and live differently (live in communes and share possessions). Marxian socialism is scientific in the sense that it abandons that false premise that you can change the world by thinking differently and living differently. Instead, it's necessary to form a society-wide plan for reconstructing industrial society according to common ownership, and organizing the entire working class. Insofar as a vague dream about a compassionate way to live was replaced by a more realistic plan for a mechanized age, this is what is meant by scientific socialism.

I think it's mainly Engels and not Marx who would disagree with me here. Engels wrote in Anti-Duhring: "These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of
history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries socialism became a science. The next thing was to work out all its details and relations." But I don't see Marx asserting that "socialism became a science." Rather, modern socialism is scientific in that it accepts a truth that utopian socialism didn't recognize: the need to unite the workers of the world behind a plan to reorganize large-scale industry.

The materialist conception of history, to a lesser extent, and Marxian economics, to a greater extent, have the scientific characteristic of reductionism, describing large and complex systems in terms of the elements that they are made of, which often explains their macroscopic behaviors. However they have virtually none of the scientific characteristic of testing hypotheses with experiments.

[CartCollector]

However they have virtually none of the scientific characteristic of testing hypotheses with experiments.
You don't always need experiments to test hypotheses. In some cases, analyzing historical records is a much simpler and faster way to test a hypothesis. For instance, tons of evidence for common descent and Darwin's theory of evolution come from analyzing fossils and other things from the distant past and not experiments. Imagine the time and expense it would take to do an experiment to see if a new species could form from another one! The same thing can be said about studying the economy- it's infeasible to do an experiment, so historical analysis is used.

[Lyev]

It's not a science, per se, but I would at least Marxism aims to use a scientific mode of analysis.

Science attempts to apply some of the following criteria:
1) Skepticism of unsupported claims
2) Combination of an open mind with critical thinking
3) Attempts to repeat experimental results.
4) Requires testability
5) Seeks out falsifying data that would disprove a hypothesis
6) Uses descriptive language
7) Performs controlled experiments
8) Self-correcting
9) Relies on evidence and reason
10) Makes no claim for absolute or certain knowledge
11) Produces useful knowledge

Pseudoscience and religion relies on some of the following criteria:
1) Has a negative attitude to skepticism
2) Does not require critical thinking
3) Does not require experimental repeatability
4) Does not require tests
5) Does not accept falsifying data that would disprove a hypothesis
6) Uses vague language
7) Relies on anecdotal evidence
8) No self-correction
9) Relies on belief and faith
10) Makes absolute claims
11) Produces no useful knowledge

[el_chavista]

However they have virtually none of the scientific characteristic of testing hypotheses with experiments.

You don't always need experiments to test hypotheses.
We're talking about social science, how do yo expect to test hypotheses with experiments?

[A.R.Amistad]

It should only be considered a science in the realm of anthropology

[The Vegan Marxist]

It should only be considered a science in the realm of anthropology

If that is the case then Socialism does not dwell within scientific thought, because, even though I believe in anthropological science, we take part in Class Warfare, not Culture Warfare.

[A.R.Amistad]

The Vegan Marxist

If that is the case then Socialism does not dwell within scientific thought, because, even though I believe in anthropological science, we take part in Class Warfare, not Culture Warfare.


Anthropology is the study of humanity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_%28genus%29). Anthropology has origins in the natural sciences (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_sciences), the humanities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities), and the social sciences (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science).[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropology#cite_note-0) The term "anthropology (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anthropology)", pronounced /ænθrɵˈpɒlədʒi/ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_English), is from the Greek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek) ἄνθρωπος, anthrōpos, "human", and -λογία, -logia (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-logia), "discourse" or "study", and was first used by François Péron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_P%C3%A9ron) when discussing his encounters with Tasmanian Aborigines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmanian_Aborigines).[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropology#cite_note-Flannery-1)
Anthropology's basic concerns are "What defines Homo sapiens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens)?", "Who are the ancestors of modern Homo sapiens?", "What are humans' physical traits?", "How do humans behave?", "Why are there variations and differences among different groups of humans?", "How has the evolutionary past of Homo sapiens influenced its social organization and culture?" and so forth.


Who said that anthropology only applied to culture? I don't think there are such things as cultural warfare. Cultures in and of themselves, even if they are totally different, never spark animosity. It is always some sort of class interest, either upper class vs. upper class or upper class vs. under class that sparks conflict, sometimes sugar-coating it with "cultural" divisions.

[The Vegan Marxist]

The Vegan Marxist




Who said that anthropology only applied to culture? I don't think there are such things as cultural warfare. Cultures in and of themselves, even if they are totally different, never spark animosity. It is always some sort of class interest, either upper class vs. upper class or upper class vs. under class that sparks conflict, sometimes sugar-coating it with "cultural" divisions.

My mistake, Comrade. This is very true.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Vegan Marxist:


Have you studied Dialectical-Materialism yet? If not, then that would be a nice start to get into when it comes to the scientific approach towards the Socialistic-ideals pertained by Marx & Engels.

Unfortunately, Dialectical Materialism is far too confused to be called a theory, let alone a scientific one.

We have debated this scores of times at RevLeft; I have listed the threads concerned here:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/RevLeft.htm

We have also debated whether history (and thus whether Historical Materialism) is a science, here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/historical-materialism-scientifici-t92796/index.html

[mikelepore]

You don't always need experiments to test hypotheses. In some cases, analyzing historical records is a much simpler and faster way to test a hypothesis. For instance, tons of evidence for common descent and Darwin's theory of evolution come from analyzing fossils and other things from the distant past and not experiments. Imagine the time and expense it would take to do an experiment to see if a new species could form from another one! The same thing can be said about studying the economy- it's infeasible to do an experiment, so historical analysis is used.

Historical data counts as an experiment as long as you didn't know about it when you formulated your hypothesis, and therefore it's additional data that can be matched against the hypothesis. Suppose Darwin didn't know what kinds of fossils would later be found when excavating in the sedimentary rock layer from the Pleistocene. Although it's old, it's new to us. This makes it a new experiment to test the claim.


We're talking about social science, how do yo expect to test hypotheses with experiments?

I don't expect to. I pointed out the inability to conduct experiments as part of an answer to the question in the name of the thread: "how scientific" is it. Activities where we can directly check an assertion are more scientific than activities where we can't.

However, it's even worse than that. We don't even have agreement on what the assertions of this science are, never mind verifying them. Someone please try to make a concise list of the main conclusions, in a form that specific enough to answer a few questions without ambiguity.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Mike:


Historical data counts as an experiment as long as you didn't know about it when you formulated your hypothesis, and therefore it's additional data that can be matched against the hypothesis. Suppose Darwin didn't know what kinds of fossils would later be found when excavating in the sedimentary rock layer from the Pleistocene. Although it's old, it's new to us. This makes it a new experiment to test the claim.

But, there are countless examples in the history of science where scientists knew what data they were looking for before they did any experiments.

For example, Einstein knew what the results of Eddington's observations would be (of light from distant stars bending around the Sun) before Eddington set off to collect any data.

Mendel also knew what he was looking for, as did Millikan before he did his oil drop experiments. There are scores of other examples.

[mikelepore]

Mike:

But, there are countless examples in the history of science where scientists knew what data they were looking for before they did any experiments.

Right, that's what makes it believable. If you can predict, you must understand. If you postdict, maybe don't really understand.

It's like when the answer is in the back of the book. The sides of the purple rectangle are 2 and 4, what is the area? The student peeks in the back of the book and it says 8. The student thinks: I guess they multiplied. God knows why. Maybe whenever something is purple you have to multiply.

How do we know that historical materialism isn't doing this?


For example, Einstein knew what the results of Eddington's observations would be (of light from distant stars bending around the Sun) before Eddington set off to collect any data.

If Eddington's photographs had come first, and then Einstein's paper came later, then we might wonder whether Einstein was merely writing any formula that would fit the measurments. We would have to worry that the formula might not really be general.

This is the problem with Marx looking backwards. He reasons out that feudalism had to collapse. But we already know that feudalism collapsed. How can we check whether there is some general reasoning involved?


Mendel also knew what he was looking for, as did Millikan before he did his oil drop experiments. There are scores of other examples.

Mendel's described a pattern, one fourth of the time this happens. There was no mechanism. Watson and Crick, suddenly there was mechanism. Comparing to a social science, I would compare Mendel to the correlation craze in sociology. Hunting for patterns. That's an important contribution, but for a different purpose.

With Millikan, there is a pile of numbers, and every number is a multiple of a common factor. Something is quantized. It shouldn't affect your credibility whether you saw the numbers before or after you conceived of the idea.

[BAM]

Marx's theories are scientific - in the social science sense. A number of his core hypotheses, it seems to me, are testable and/or verifiable.

- the rate of profit declines over the business cycle

- increased productivity lowers prices

- competition leads to the increasing centralization of capital

there are plenty more.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Mike:


Right, that's what makes it believable. If you can predict, you must understand. If you postdict, maybe don't really understand.

But this has never been generally true in science. Check this out:


"...[I]n the historical progression from Aristotelian to Cartesian to Newtonian to contemporary mechanical theories, the evidence available at the time each earlier theory was accepted offered equally strong support to each of the (then-unimagined) later alternatives. The same pattern would seem to obtain in the historical progression from elemental to early corpuscularian chemistry to Stahl's phlogiston theory to Lavoisier's oxygen chemistry to Daltonian atomic and contemporary physical chemistry; from various versions of preformationism to epigenetic theories of embryology; from the caloric theory of heat to later and ultimately contemporary thermodynamic theories; from effluvial theories of electricity and magnetism to theories of the electromagnetic ether and contemporary electromagnetism; from humoral imbalance to miasmatic to contagion and ultimately germ theories of disease; from 18th Century corpuscular theories of light to 19th Century wave theories to contemporary quantum mechanical conception; from Hippocrates's pangenesis to Darwin's blending theory of inheritance (and his own 'gemmule' version of pangenesis) to Wiesmann's germ-plasm theory and Mendelian and contemporary molecular genetics; from Cuvier's theory of functionally integrated and necessarily static biological species or Lamarck's autogenesis to Darwinian evolutionary theory; and so on in a seemingly endless array of theories, the evidence for which ultimately turned out to support one or more unimagined competitors just as well. Thus, the history of scientific enquiry offers a straightforward inductive rationale for thinking that there are alternatives to our best theories equally well-confirmed by the evidence, even when we are unable to conceive of them at the time." [Stanford (2001), p.9.]

P Stanford, (2001), 'Refusing The Devil's Bargain: What Kind Of Underdetermination Should We Take Seriously?', in Barrett and Alexander (2001), pp.1-12.

Barrett, J., and Alexander, J. (2001), (eds.), PSA 2000, Part 1, Supplement to Philosophy of Science 68, 3 (University of Chicago Press).

[PSA = Philosophy of Science Association; the PSA volumes comprise papers submitted to its biennial meeting.]

Moreover, the ability of a 'successful' theory to predict new data is double-edged:


"The arguments which terminate in an hypothesis's positing the existence of some trans-Uranic object, the planet Neptune, and the structurally identical arguments which forced Leverrier to urge the existence of an intra-Mercurial planet, the planet 'Vulcan', to explain the precessional aberrations of our 'innermost' solar system neighbour are formally one and the same. They run: (1) Newtonian mechanics is true; (2) Newtonian mechanics requires planet P to move in exactly this manner, x, y, z, …; (3) but P does not move à la x, y, z; (4) so either (a) there exists some as-yet-unobserved object, o, or (b) Newtonian mechanics is false. (5) 4b) contradicts 1) so 4a) is true -- there exists some as-yet-undetected body which will put everything right again between observation and theory. The variable 'o' took the value 'Neptune' in the former case; it took the value 'Vulcan' in the latter case. And these insertions constituted the zenith and the nadir of classical celestial mechanics, for Neptune does exist, whereas Vulcan does not." [Hanson (1970), p.257.]

Hanson, N. (1962), 'Leverrier: The Zenith And Nadir Of Newtonian Mechanics', Isis 53, pp.359-78; reprinted in Hanson (1971), pp.103-26.

--------, (1971), What I Do Not Believe, And Other Essays (Reidel).

It's only a myth put about by those who do not know the history of science that this how scientists generally proceed.


How do we know that historical materialism isn't doing this?

Because it's a generalisation of the experience of working people going back many thousands of years, and conforms to common understanding and ordinary language -- which is why it often makes immediate sense to workers when they are ready to listen to it (in strikes, etc.). Many already think along these lines anyway (about the rich, the cops, the state, etc.).


If Eddington's photographs had come first, and then Einstein's paper came later, then we might wonder whether Einstein was merely writing any formula that would fit the measurments. We would have to worry that the formula might not really be general.

In fact, the evidence suggests that Eddington fluked his results (as did Ptolemy, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Mendel, and Millikan -- and many others).


He reasons out that feudalism had to collapse. But we already know that feudalism collapsed. How can we check whether there is some general reasoning involved?

Well, what do you expect if he is trying to explain why it collapsed? Do you expect him to have argued: "We do not know if feudalism collapsed, so let's try and explain..."


Mendel's described a pattern, one fourth of the time this happens. There was no mechanism. Watson and Crick, suddenly there was mechanism. Comparing to a social science, I would compare Mendel to the correlation craze in sociology. Hunting for patterns. That's an important contribution, but for a different purpose.

Indeed, but, as I noted above, the evidence suggests that Mendel 'duked' his results. So did Millikan.