The “Marxism and Science” Debate : 

There is a long debate about whether or not Marxism is scientific. I suppose this is not quite the same debate as whether or not Marxism is a science, or one of the “special sciences”.

I often have the feeling that the debate is a camera obscura, since the debate serves also as a surrogate for “deeper” philosophical and political issues. Am I then forced to reduce the debate to philosophy and politics? The ideological fight is broad.

The defense of the proposition that Marxism is scientific stems from a long intellectual and practical history which goes back to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin etc, who themselves took scientific methodology very seriously, and attempted to apply the proper method to their own intellectual and practical work.

Marx distinguished his own contribution and place in the socialist movement by dubbing both his evolving work, and communist commitment “scientific socialism”. He summarized his position in this name, in contrast to what he called the “utopian socialism” of Saint-Simone, Fourier, and Owen. He also criticized this strain of “utopian socialism” in the domain of political economy.

However, the Marxism and science debate  began to take on a more visible form with first, the anti-Marxist arguments of Karl Popper, and second, the humanist trend that became frequent in Western European intellectual circles and political movements in the 20th century.

Of course, everyone will remember Louis Althusser’s proud dictum that “Marxism is a science”, and that “Marx discovered a Continent, the continent of history”. In other words, mature Marxist theory is the science of history”. I will not go too much into Althusser for whom I have a profound and tortured sense of admiration.

Yet, I find that in his earliest years, the most interesting thing he said on the philosophy of science is found in a footnote in Reading Capital.  The statement is that science is a method of posing questions and giving answers. However, suffice it to say the arguments backing the target-proposition we are concerned with are found wanting.

It is often not clear what anti-Marxists are criticizing, or for that matter what Marxists are defending. It is often not clear what the scope of their argument is. Are they criticizing people? Or propositions? Do their arguments apply to people or propositions?

The entirety of Karl Popper’s anti-marxist criticism reposes on the equivocation and confusion between persons and propositions. This is ironic for Popper, since he is an objectivist in epistemology, and denies the possibility of a fruitful philosophic reduction of the epistemic conditions of theories to the psychological conditions of individuals.        ( A bit of analytic terminology: an individual making a statement expresses a proposition and that proposition, let us say in the canonical case, has truth-conditions independent of the psychological state of the individual).

Finally , and this is very important, what do these anti-marxists mean when they talk about “science” ? What do they mean by calling something “scientific”?

In short there is an utter confusion in the terms of debate.

So for Marxists:

There is a need to specify, in context, what is meant by Marxism.

Then, we need to agree , in context, on a meaning for “science” or “scientific”.

This means we need to present in some way a summary of the philosophy of science presupposed by Marxist theory from which to judge the similarities and differences between Marxism and other scientific theories.

Note1 : Marxism

Recently, I was reading a work of POS called Theory and Reality by a prominent philosopher of biology Peter Godfrey-Smith. He at least had the decency to claim that many Marxists were scientific, but that sufficient time has revealed that Marxism is false, and hence should be replaced much as previous theories have been. This is another kind of argument, one that understands that scientific theories can turn out false. I would have been more interested in his claims had he then not said that the “class-struggle” is dead and that the career of history follows Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations.

There is great difficulty in using the term “Marxism” as if it referred to one entity. This is the fallacy unum nomen unum nominatum- the fallacy of presupposing that because one term enters into many different propositional contexts that this term refers to an entity.

Take the age-old debate on universals. Plato, to vulgarize, believed that predicate-terms like “the beautiful”, when used to make a statement, referred to a single entity . Things that are  “beautiful” have their being by participating in the form of the beautiful. In short, the predicate “beautiful” is a form “the beautiful”, an unchanging essence which exists independent and constitutes the being of those things participating in the beautiful. Apparently these forms are accessible by remembrance and reason (nous).   

Today there is a similar problem that enters in analytic philosophy. In analytic philosophy, philosophers define something by giving a set of severally necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. Definition takes the form of a bi-conditional statement in which the set of statements constituting the definiens is equated to the set of statements constituting the  definiendum such that the definiendum is a set of severally necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. For example, Gettier believes that the whole of the history of philosophy on the question of the definition of knowledge is reducible to the formula that S knows P iff S has a justified true belief that P. This mode of defining, for all its analytic elegance, has the disadvantage of inclining towards a unification of the meaning of a term.

A term enters into many different contexts, it is the case in language that in different propositional contexts, the meaning of the term changes. Sometimes these changes are drastic. If we seek such a form of definition then philosophers tend to ignore the way the meaning changes relative to the propositional context. They can ignore important distinctions.

Even if we could identify the severally necessary and jointly sufficient conditions constituting the use of the predicate “beautiful” we would not therefore presuppose that there is one meaning to the term “beautiful” , but understand that we are using a concept in which the criterion of membership is determined by relations of resemblance. Even then, it is difficult to think what is consonant between a beautiful horse and person….

In recent years, efforts in philosophy have undermined this approach as the only mode of definition. In fact, many philosophers prefer to treat the meaning of terms in a contextual manner, since some terms change their meaning in different contexts.

My guiding thread would be: Marxism cannot be given a definition in the form of severally necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. Marxism refers to many different things in different contexts. It can mean, certain persons, certain theories, a movement, specific political formations and ideologies, a culture and identity, indeed a whole intellectual and practical history. Hence, to me, unless one of these senses is specified, the debate is pure confusion.

Note 2: Philosophy of Science

It is at the level of philosophy , though not only,  that someone can respond to such a question as “what is science” in a concise and hopefully, fruitful, manner. I will not try to attempt anything as give an exhaustive definition here.

I tend to use a “dual-realist definition of science”. My strategy is both pragmatic and normative. I want to study how science is and should be. I mean by a dual-realist definition that science is the methodology that makes possible the discovery the structure and change underlying the world and which results in the production of scientific items ( hypotheses, theories, concepts, laws, models, tables, diagrams etc.). This is not an exact description of the actual process that has and constitutes scientific practice at any given moment, but it is especially important to presuppose such a description in the theory of the mechanisms of scientific change.

Above all, the production of scientific items cannot be judged by rules that guarantee utter certainty. If the philosophy of science, the description of scientific methodology is invalid then Marxism would be judged according to an unreliable standard.

John Stuart Mill use to uphold epistemic standards of scientific methodology and for scientific theories that quantum mechanics could not live up to! Is it any surprise that he considered the Darwinian theory of natural selection to be a mere hypothesis, without the sufficient inductive warrant to label it a scientific theory. John Stuart Mill considered Newtonian mechanics to be the canon of scientific method and epistemology, but it is natural selection which , so to speak, withstood the test of time. His philosophy of science put much-too high epistemic standards on scientific methodology and postulated more or less imaginary epistemic conditions for theories, even Newtonian mechanics failed the test. He forgot above all that the production of scientific theories cannot be judged by a criterion guaranteeing absolute certainty.

A scientific theory must be judged according to proper rules guaranteeing relative certainty and with reference to other alternative theories.

In a similar move, many of the critiques leveled against “classical” Marxism (theory ? people? ) presuppose a distorted and false picture of scientific practice and then proceed to judge Marxism by a yardstick inapplicable to anything that has happened in the dense and modern career that we dub “science”. The New Left made a career out of equating science with neo-positivism and then judging Marxism according to this standard.

Marxists do not have to presuppose a neo-positivist philosophy of science because the history of science does not corroborate such a philosophy. Nor does such a philosophy correspond to the rich complexity and diversity of scientific practice.

But in fact, there has been a whole line of Marxists, philosophers of science, scientists who have gone against this neo-posivist interpretation of science. If Marxists or Marxism are to be judged according to a philosophy of science (which itself is high dubious!) , then at least let it be a correct philosophy of science, one that reveals the complexity and richness of scientific practice.

Note 3: 

We already mentioned there are Marxists and there are theories of Marxism. But even this is not an exhaustive distinction. Yet it is helpful in framing the argument. I think the best mode of approaching the argument is to 1) not come up with a terrible philosophy of science 2) to understand the context-sensitive character of the terms “Marxism” and “science” and 3) to argue that there are certain marxists and certain marxist theories that have robust similarities to actual scientific practice and theory. If a Marxist is confronted with claims that historical materialism is unscientific, it would be excellent to show the way in which the most defensible version of historical materialism in fact has deep consonance with , say, evolutionary theory. Of course then the method is to show at what levels of comparison, the two agree and differ.

As a philosopher of science, a lot of my work focuses on attempting to understand kinds of scientific methodology and the history of science, in order to produce the best possible theory of history.

My work has taught me , essentially, to be ambivalent about whether Marxist theory is scientific. In some cases, it is best to use scientific methodology to study human history and social forms, and it is my belief that the best instance to use such methodology is in the theoretical and empirical study of human history and social forms. However, there are many modes of knowledge and none constitute an empire onto themselves.

A final political note: 

I said that the whole debate on Marxism and science might be a smoke-screen. It hides deeper debates on the character of Marxism. Really the proposition that “Marxism is a science” is a debate about whether Marxist theory is true and if it is constitutes a valid protocol for action. It is hard for me to deny , as a Marxist philosopher, that these debates are important.

All I can say is that the most defensible Marxist theory does what it does best. As for claims of “scientific socialism”, all they amount to is a defense of Marxist theory as the best current theory of historical change and change, and above all as the best protocol for revolutionary action.

The best current theory and protocol should be an a posteriori inference from the global history of the communist movement. The propositions of historical materialism and Marxist philosophy, however a priori intelligible they may seem,  are a posteriori. Hence they must be tested in a practical manner. In the end, we will all have to see if Marxist theory is “scientific socialism”. That will require thought, sweat, and blood.