Marxism as a science.

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

To what extent can Marxism be called a science? How do we measure a Marxist analysis as being scientifically correct? To what extent is it scientific? Given the subjective variations of interpretations amongst Marxists in their own analyses, is this a case of poor interpretation and application of the scientific method? I've heard some odd things being classed as 'scientific' by some Marxists (will find an example later) but with no way to back this up with evidence. What factors determine how correct a Marxist analysis of a certain historical event is, scientifically?

I don't know if this is a stupid question or not, and generally I subscribe to a materialistic view of history and society, and indeed all things, but I am unsure of how we classify Marxism as a science in the way we classify quantam-mechanics as a science. Its unclear to me how our understanding of society and history is explicitly scientific. Answers will be appreciated. In short, how do we come to the conclusion that Marxism is scientific?

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

I guess another question would be, to what extent is the Marxist analytical method subjective, or how can we be sure of its objectivity? And finally, is Marxism always considered a science by Marxists? I know that there are plenty of people outside of Marxism who wouldn't consider it a science, but I am unsure of their own arguments that brought them to that conclusion.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Well there are several things involved here.

First is Marxist pseudo-science best represented by the official science of the USSR. Just as under capitalism where science is often used or corralled into areas that support bourgeois ideas, the same thing can happen with Marxism and so various regimes calling themselves socialist used both Marxism and physical and other sciences to back up their status quo. Where science was misused in that way, that "science" should be acknowledged as biased and unscientific. But just as bad genetic-determinism of US scientists doesn't mean that all genetic science is bunk and just as social-Darwinism doesn't mean evolutionary theory is bunk, misuse of science or a social science like Marxism doesn't mean that it is inherently wrong.

Second, good Marxism should be a science. It's not a mechanical science, it's social but in that the theories should only be as valid as they are useful to actual practice, it is much more of a science than abstract philosophy or things that can't be tested out. For the bourgoise, they run the world so it's not as important that people actually understand how it works - in fact it's best to make the material functioning of society kind of vague and make the exploitation of people in society invisible. But for a revolutionary class (including the capitalists when they were still trying to achieve hegemony over society) needs to actually know how things work in order to change them.

As to the question of different and competing readings of Marxist theory... well a lot of that does have to do with the fact that our theories can not be as easily tested as other things. First, we can not control when revolutions happen and under what circumstances, so it is hard to definitively prove one theory over another. And that revolutions and uprisings, which are often short, chaotic, full of misinformation, and don't happen on a regular schedule makes things difficult. Second, with some scientific theories you can test them out by isolating variables - especially subjective or conditional ones. But in society, there are countless variables and tons of subjective forces involved (what revolutionary groups do, what individual workers do, how other classes relate to the working class, how the capitalists try and resist our movements). So again, even when revolutions happen, there can be disagreements over what factors made a difference - just look at any debate about the Russian Revolution and some people will say that the bolshevik party was organized in a bad way that lead to substitutionism, others will say it was the post-revolution conditions, others will say the smallness of the working class, etc.

But again, there are huge disagreements about evolutionary theory (among evolutionary scientists, not between them and creationists) but that doesn't mean that it is the most reasonable theory given the material evidence we have... it also doesn't mean it's infallable and when new evidence is discovered (in the case of Marxism, a new movement or revolution somewhere and for evolutionary scientists it might be new fossil discoveries) the theories have to take that into account and change if necessarily.

[Black Sheep]

Materialism is scientific thinking (aka scientific naturalism, which is the new word for it so that doesn't remind us of Marx).
Oh no no no, that's red terror and gulags

Marxism and capitalist theory include a moral/interest related choice, with the 1st directing resources towards the majority, the 2nd to a minority.

Marxist economics do improve productivity, and it would be a scientific choice to select that system if maximizing production was the problem at hand.
Capitalist economics do maximize personal wealth of a minority, and it is a scientific choice to select that system if maximizing personal wealth is the problem at hand.

So each system is "the best choice" , according to what you want to achieve.

If the goal is, as many moralists put it, "happinness all over the world" , "no more starving children" etc , then yeah, communist economy is the scientific choice.

[Zanthorus]

I think this is a very important and fundamental question which deserves a rigorous answer, but for the same reason it is a question which is impossible to answer in the space of a single Revleft post. I will try to give the outline of an answer, but for further reading I reccomend Marx and Wittgenstein: Social Praxis and Social Explanation by David D. Rubenstein which covers all the major issues concerning Marxism and the problem of gaining scientific knowledge of society.

I think you touch upon a basic issue here:


I guess another question would be, to what extent is the Marxist analytical method subjective, or how can we be sure of its objectivity?

The problem of objective knowledge in social science is a very basic one dividing philosophers of sociology. To a certain extent the argument also dovetails with something you touch upon here:


I am unsure of how we classify Marxism as a science in the way we classify quantam-mechanics as a science.

Which is to say, to what extent are the methods of research and theory construction utilised in the natural sciences appropriate for the sciences we usually classify as social? On this question we can identify two very basic positions. The first, which we can classify as objectivism or positivism, asserts that the methods of the natural sciences can be unproblematically applied to the phenomena investigated by the social sciences to construct plausible theories. The second, which we can classify as subjectivism, emphasises the irreducability of social phenomena to physical and observable events and processes, and thus advocates a method for the social sciences which is qualitatively differentiated from that of the physical sciences. It is worth noting right from the start that both of these approaches share a common assumption, namely a dualism of mental and physical phenomena in a Cartesian vein. Only they draw widely differing conclusions from this dualism.

Objectivism comes in strong and weak veins. 'Strong' objectivists emphasise that because mental phenomena are fundamentally private and unobservable, in contrast to physical phenomena, the emphasis of social science should be on objective, fact-based descriptions of social action untainted by any interpretive understanding of these actions. The emphasis is on brute, empirical data which can be verified by sense-data. But this method seems to run into some obvious problems. Consider a very basic social act, that of saying the word 'dog' to someone else. Your mouth moves, and your vocal cords and lungs work in harmony to expell air vibrating at the set of frequencies which we normally interpret as the word 'dog'. But already with the last part, we have encountered a problem, for how do we interpret this set of physical occurences as a person saying the word 'dog'?

Imagine if we were to hear the same set of frequencies which we normally interpret as someone saying the word 'dog', but instead it was a product of the wind blowing in a peculiar way on a specific object, or something of the kind. We should observe the same physical vibrations as someone saying the word 'dog', yet would see that it was not in fact someone saying a word, but merely the wind blowing in a peculiar way. There seems to be some level of subjectivity and intention which gives the act of someone saying the word 'dog' a special a qualitatively differentiated character to a peculiar movement of the air.

Let's take a perhaps somewhat clearer example. Imagine a teacher marking a cross next to the answer of a pupil on a test which was incorrect, and then putting a cross on a slip of paper in a voting booth to vote for a candidate. Considered from a physical standpoint, the action of picking up a pen and marking a cross is the same in both cases. Yet clearly the phenomenon of someone voting is qualitatively different from that of a teacher marking a pupil's answer as incorrect, and these two actions have different imports in the social sciences. It appears inescapable then that some fundamental level of subjective meaning must be incorporated into social science in order for it to explain anything, or else at the most we would have an incredibly limited mode of explanation which could not even show the difference between voting and marking down a student's answer as false.

But this version of objectivism is crude and not often employed. More commonly the objectivist will attempt to operationalise phenomena such as 'delinquency', 'boredom' and so on and then use a research method such as questionnaire's to draw links between the variables. However, even here the problem of meaning creeps in again. For how are we to 'objectively' define a phenomoneon such as delinquency? Someone engaging in homosexual activity might be considered a delinquent in certain societies, and perfectly normal in others. Physically, one instance of homosexual activity might be indistinguishable from another, yet in one case it might be considered as a symptom of 'deviancy' and in another not. Clearly there is some level of subjective meaning which makes it such that in one society homosexuality is a criminal deviancy and in another is perfectly acceptable or at least tolerated to a greater degree.

However, the subjectivist alternative in social science is equally unsatisfying. Subjectivists begin from the examination of everyday social experience, and refuse the examination of social structures except in the common sense terms of the actors within them. However at a basic level it is clear that the common sense ideas of social actors can be at extreme variance with the actual facts of social life. George Bush probably considers the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to have been genuine humanitarian endeavours, but that does not necessarily stop it from being the case that they were in fact bloodthirsty ventures of US imperialism. Similarly, the ideas of social actors about their situation can often be contradictory. If we interviewed a Nazi and a KPD member about the problems of Weimar Germany, I expect that the former would give us an explanation in terms of a Jewish conspiracy, and the latter in terms of the effects of western imperialism and a decaying capitalism. And I think (Or I hope) that any subjectivist would reject out of hand the suggestion that the problems of Weimar Germany were the result of a Jewish conspiracy, and I suspect that many would doubt the explanation of the KPD member as well. And subjectivism leads to individualist conclusions which are clearly unacceptable and at variance with reality, for example the subjectivist would be forced to conclude that povery is not the result of any structural factors but instead a result of the ideas of social actors.

Now as for where Marxism fits into this, in the first place it should be clear that Marx rejects subjectivism, and indeed parts Capital of capital are dedicated to showing how the majority of common-sense ideas about how the economy works are at odds with reality. Since Marx is committed to a position that we can sensibly talk about ideologies which distort people's interpretation of reality, and at the same time examine how these ideologies originate in features of social reality, as well as being committed to the idea that at some level we can give causal law-like explanations of society, he cannot be reconciled with subjectivism. He clearly positions himself against it in The German Ideology:


Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true.

And again in the 18th Brumaire Marx talks about how the participants of bourgeois revolutions concealed the real content of their actions by draping them in long dead traditions:


...in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk.

Usually it is supposed that Marx is thus committed to an objectivism, with his explanation of capitalist society mirroring explanations in the natural sciences. There is, however, a few obvious counter-factuals which belie any understanding of Marx as an objectivist. First of all, objectivism is usually associated with a nomothetic approach, deriving general laws about society. Yet Marx is hostile to any such explanations of society in terms of universally valid laws, and instead emphasises the historical specificity of the laws which govern social life. Whereas an objectivist might see Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte as explainable on the same terms, Marx rejects such an approach as ignoring the qualitatively different characters of the societies and cultures in which they originated:


I hope that my work will contribute toward eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called Caesarism. In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget Sismondi’s significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat. With so complete a difference between the material, economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggles, the political figures produced by them can likewise have no more in common with one another than the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the High Priest Samuel.

Again, a similar train of thought can be seen in his quoting approvingly of a reviewer of Capital in the afterword to the second German edition summarising his method:


But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own. ... As soon as society has outlived a given period of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws.

Another counter-factual is Marx's explanation of value. Marx stringently identifies the physical aspect of the commodity, it's bodily form, with the concept of use-value. Value, however, is something qualitatively different from the commodities physical form:


This common “something” cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value.

And again, in the earlier 'A Contribution...' Marx differentiates stringently between the physical properties of a commodity and it's social properties:


Whatever its social form may be, wealth always consists of use-values, which in the first instance are not affected by this form. From the taste of wheat it is not possible to tell who produced it, a Russian serf, a French peasant or an English capitalist.

It is clear that for Marx, a commodity gains it's value not from any physical features, but from it's existence in a particular set of social relations and institutions, it's presence in a set of rule-governed social interactions. And here, I think, we can find the solution to the problem.

At the beginning I said that both objectivism and subjectivism are characterised by a Cartesian dualism of the mental and the physical. On this account, the 'mental' is considered to be something private, tucked away in a persons mind. The subjective meaning of actions is impenetrable to all except the individual who means the action a certain way. Marx himself explodes both the objectivist/subjectivist dualism and the dualism of the mind and body with a unique philosophy of mind, which in the history of philosophy is unique except for it's strong correlation with the similar efforts of Ludwig Wittgenstein. This philosophy of mind sees meaning not as an attribute of a consciousness which is private and unreachable to all except a privileged individual observer whose consciousness it is, but of social practice, and mind as a property of action.

To go back to the example I used in critiquing objectivism, of the marking of a cross. What makes the marking of the cross an act of voting in one instance and in the other the act of marking a pupils work is the acts presence within a context of manifold rule-governed social practices and institutions which give to the act the meaning of voting in one instance and marking in another. Similarly, what gives the word 'dog' it's meaning is not the frequencies in the air which are characteristic of it, nor is it the private intentions of an individual, but rather the utterance of the word occuring in the context of the existence of the manifold practices and social forms of life which give our language meaning. Caesar is differentiated from Bonaparte because of the manifold differences in social practices and relationships which constituted the context in which each individual rose to prominence. The product of labour gains it's status as a commodity from it's presence with a manifold of human practices and institutions which stamp it with the character of the commodity-form.

This approach has another unique characteristic apart from it's resolution of subject/object and mind/body dualism. It opposes the division of reality into discrete 'bits' which can be examined independently of one another an instead analyses the aspects of society as a totality. It is impossible to hermetically seperate Marx's analysis of capitalism into one part analysis of the commodity-form and one part analysis of the wage-labour/capital relation without doing a fundamental violence to his mode of explanation. For Marx, the commodity-form only becomes the general social form of material wealth when the social organisation of labour is that of wage-labour. Marx criticises Thomas Tooke for hermetically seperating the various functions of money, when in his opinion they should be considered as an organic unity with themselves as well as with the other features of capitalist society:


None of these writers [Tooke, Wilson and Fullarton] take a one-sided view of money but deal with its various aspects, though only from a mechanical angle without paying any attention to the organic relation of these aspects either with one another or with the system of economic categories as a whole.

Again, in the Grundrisse Marx criticises the bourgeois economists who fail to see the organic unity of economic relations and the legal structure within which they occur. And it is clear that already in the first chapter of capital the relation of commodity exchange which Marx examines is bound up with a whole set of legal relations and institutions of private property, contractual law and so on. Since acts are bound up with the system of social relations and practices in which they occur, they have to be considered in this social context, as opposed to being abstracted from it. The act of commodity exchange has, for Marx, a very different import and meaning in pre-capitalist societies when it forms an isolated mode of exchange, than in capitalist society when the commodity is the general form of wealth. Similarly, financial capital exists prior to the rise of modern industrial societies, but considering financial capital 'in itself' without regard to the qualitative change it undergoes in the context of the manifold relations which come into being with the rise of capitalist societies is alien to Marx's method. A 15th century merchant cannot form the basis of an analysis of Loyds TSB.

Now to answer your question directly:


To what extent can Marxism be called a science?

To some extent it can't, in that Marxism involves, as I have shown, positions on the philosophy of mind, language, action and sociology which are not strictly scientific, since of course the method of philosophy is absolutely unlike that of the sciences. However, Marx's critique of political economy is most certainly scientific to the extent that it conforms with the schema I have briefly outlined for scientificity in the social sciences. Namely, it starts from attempting to understand the meaning of social actions not in terms of subjective intentions but from the meaning imported to them by the rule-governed system of social relations and social practices which forms their context, rather than the raw sense-data of empiricism or the subjective consciousness of individual actors, avoids the compartmentalisation of social facts and instead examines them as a totality, and on this basis constructs verifiable hypotheses. Since this approach to social science avoids both dualism and the compartmentalisation of social phenomena, it shares strong connections with the concerns which marked the philosophy of GWF Hegel. Thus, we can say that Marxism is a science to the extent which it is dialectical.

Oh, and to get back to to your original question of whether Marxism is a science like quantum mechanics, this depends on your view of the philosophy of natural science. One of the assumptions of objectivism which I haven't critiqued is that natural sciences are characterised by empiricism and positivism. In the Marxist tradition of course, there has been a prominent current which regards natural science as also dialectical, beginning with Engels and arguably also Marx himself (Lukács and Korsch are probably characteristic of the opposite view). But I don't want to risk rambling on for any longer than I already have, and the first draft of this post was wiped out by a computer failure, so I probably better post quickly, since I don't really feel like typing out all the above a third time :tt2:

[RadioRaheem84]

Good work, Zanthorus.:thumbup1: