Is Marxism "Scientific"?

Yes but not always successful science

“The more Socialist theories claim to be “scientific” the more transitory they are; but Socialist values are permanent. The distinction between theories and values is not sufficiently recognized, but it is fundamental. On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men.” — Ignazio Silone

I read “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” by Engels. I may have read it, oh, forty years ago, but if so I have no memory of it. I would say there’s a lot of science, or social science if you like, in M&E, but it is not necessarily what they imagined it to be. For one thing, the notion that capitalist development would motivate the working class to revolt and equip it to rule has clearly been discredited. Another dubious claim was the inevitability of total breakdown, thereby creating the political conditions for revolution. On the plus side, I find the essay to be a useful, compact version of the gigantic M&E theoretical apparatus.

The architecture of capitalist oppression or exploitation elaborated by M&E I find compelling. So too what I take to be the historical materialism. I can’t say much either way about dialectics, since I barely understand it, though the inadequacy of Hegelian idealism is plain enough. Gerry Cohen has a simplified version in his book “History, Labour, and Freedom” that I could almost understand.

The combination of a radically transformed society absent any remotely plausible political story for how it might come about is wildly utopian, no less than were the Owenites or Saint Simon, but different. M&E have a cock-and-bull materialist sociological scenario, not more believable than other socialists’ fantasies that the masses would eventually see the light out of the sheer power of reason and do what needs to be done.

In the essay cited above, Engels offers a case for how transformation might come about spontaneously. As RNH is at pains to point out, there is no hint of Leninist vanguardism or putschism. There is more a sense that the masses come to socialism so overwhelmingly that revolution is almost a formality. Moreover, at that point the need for any State would disappear, and running a planned economy would be a piece of cake. Good grief!

There is certainly no lack of disruption under capitalism, but my argument has been that if a disruption fails to create the preconditions for socialist politics, meaning no less than an ongoing mass mobilization — Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street times twenty, they are just more bumps in the road. They do not deserve the designation of “crisis.” Compare the “color revolutions” that brought down several Eastern European governments. It is not enough to merely assemble. We do plenty of that. Work needs to be halted too.

A mitigating factor for the perils of Capitalism is that, thanks to Keynes, those bumps in the road can be attenuated. The big, Big One could be different, but we’ve never had such a one. The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 was pretty big, and we waltzed right through it. You can’t base political strategy on highly unlikely, or even rare, events.

Marx and Engels counterposed the dynamism of the forces of production to the anarchy of markets. Ironically, this seems to be coming to pass in the form of ecological crises, both from climate change and the threat of pandemics. The anarchy of the markets gives rise to social breakdown, the MAGA movement, and the diminished capacity of the public sector, upon which our defense against national and global hazards depends.

My nutty theory in this vein is that M&E’s least regarded prediction, that the working class would rise up, could be said to coming to fruition in the form of the rise of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and the endurance of social democracy in Western Europe. The post-WWII blossoming of social-democracy as a necessary product of a compelling need under post-war destruction has some resemblance to the M&E idea of socialism arising from the necessary breakdown of Capitalism. I see the Ukraine was as a battle between global autocracy and social-democracy.

The common thread in the PRC and the European Union is the centrality of state-based economic dirigism, by which I mean ample welfare states and active regulation. Against these forces stands the deeply destructive, true anarchy of Trump and his international allies in Russia, India, Hungary, Turkey, the Philipines, Israel, and the oil shiekdoms.

My other fearless forecast is that the Chinese are smart and will figure out that they are on the wrong side. Then Putin will be truly fucked.