Marx, scientific?

[Fedor Emelianenko]

I am going to a political science class. Our essay is if Marx really was scientific. What are the arguments in favor of Marx being scientific? What are the arguments against?

[Zanthorus]

Well, certainly Marx's critique of political economy is scientific as "It meets the main requirements for a scientific theory: on the formal side, it proposes a set of principles for the explanation of observable realities and the prediction of definite trends; it is falsifiable, though it is in fact quite well confirmed." (Social Knowledge: An Essay on the Nature and Limits of Social Science by Paul Mattick Jr (http://libcom.org/files/PDF_Mattick_Jr-Social_Knowledge.pdf))

[Armchair War Criminal]

As an amusing historical footnote, Popper hated Marx and basically constructed his theory of science around proving that Marxism was unscientific. (This is separate, of course, from whether Marx's political economy actually meets Popperian standards of falsifiability.) When Marx calls his approach "scientific" he actually means something like "a reasoned analysis of reality, informed by the data as we have it, and theoretically well-elaborated," which is a bit different from many modern definitions (whether or not it does meet those modern definitions.)

The best argument against the scientific status of Marx is that he practiced social science before modern statistical techniques and data become available, and thus before experiments in social science meant anything. Marx based his theories on an ex post analysis of history, which isn't amenable to formulating theses and seeing if they're rejected or not by the data.

[Oswy]

I am going to a political science class. Our essay is if Marx really was scientific. What are the arguments in favor of Marx being scientific? What are the arguments against?

Your essay should address the issue of what is considered 'scientific' at the deeper philosophical level. I don't know what kind of library access you have but I recommend looking up Steven French's Science: Key Concepts in Philosophy (Continuum, 2007). There are several ways to define science and at the philosophical level there is disagreement about what core constituents make a subject or methodology 'scientific' (don't let anyone tell you otherwise). My starting point would be that Marx was scientific because he was looking to establish a theoretical framework which fitted the observed reality and was thus potentially falsifiable. Some might argue that study of human civilisation and behaviour isn't 'scientific' because you can't do controlled experiments like you can in physics and chemistry, but this is a little unfair as many 'scientific' subjects, like paeleontology and astronomy also don't easily allow for such experimentation.

EDIT: Get your hands on Matt Perry's Marxism and History (Palgrave, 2002) where Perry defends Marxist history as science in a few places.