What Is Scientific In "Scientific Socialism"?

The answer is suggested in Friedrich Engels’s “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.” I do not find it satisfying.

I got started on my kick of going back to sources by this blog post by a Canadian professor, who asked the profound question, if you oppose inequality, poverty, etc., why do you need Marx? Isn’t John Rawls enough? We certainly think more about inequality and privation than we do the theory of surplus value.

You can have socialism without Marx. This led me into the literature of so-called “analytical Marxism,” which includes the Przeworski book I’ve been reading and writing about.

A good part of the Engels text goes into the genesis of materialism and dialectics. I have some feel for the materialism part. Surely the study of history is enriched by the examination of the economics of societies, their related legal forms, the structures of privilege and domination, the make-up of social classes. Such analyses can be done well or badly, but the relevance is clear. The evolutionary story, from slavery to feudalism, to bourgeois capitalism, seems tenable.

When it comes to dialectics, I’m just here making mud pies. From the discussion by Engels, early in the text, it comes off as obscurantist. At the time (latter 19th Century), German socialism in the form of the successful Social-Democratic Party, had prestige and the intellectual authority of Marx, Engels and later Karl Kautsky. Europe was in the throes of industrialization, scientific discovery, and left political turmoil. The optimism associated with the period lent itself to expectations of revolutionary progress, including the inevitability of socialist transformation at the hands of the rising working class. Obviously this precept has not aged well.

One need not revert to the nostrum that nothing ever changes for the better to maintain skepticism about the inevitability of socialism.

I had expected the Engels text to contrast moral justifications for socialism with “scientific” ones. The latter rests on the delusion that Marxism reveals the “laws of motion” of capitalist society, this motion taking us to the triumph of socialism. The irrelevance of moral considerations for understanding historical advance is reflected as follows:

“Like every other social advance, it (socialism—MBS) becomes practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions.”

Those economic conditions are the purported conflict between productive forces and social relations. They are manifested in the fruits of anarchical production — booms and busts, with associated human misery. Over-production of commodities leads to breakdown. Increasing monopolization forces the capitalist state to increasingly take over the direction of the economy, starting with nationalization of industries such as transportation and communications. The pressure eventually motivates the working class to take things in hand.

The “science” here is the story of how the system winds itself up to a breaking point, rather than being merely a fount of injustice. It’s a clever story, but it has failed to prove out.

Engels has nice things to say about his utopians: Henri de Saint Simon, Charles Fourier, and especially Robert Owen, but his contrasting picture of the “science” in his own socialism he boils down to:

1. Understanding that the “laws of motion” of society, though the lens of “dialectical materialism,” would lead inexorably to socialism;

2. The concept of surplus value as the key to historical evolution.

As I’ve said, the “science” inherent in the first item shows no sign of being realized. In defense of the early Marxists, it did look more realistic around, say, 1880. Industry was blossoming, dragooning peasants off their land into an industrial proletariat. Independent artisans were being absorbed into that proletariat. On the other side were those who monopolized ownership of capital, through no particular virtue of their own. How could such a trend not end in revolt?

We can’t blame Marx and Engels for failing to foresee the ensuing hundred years, but we can look askance at the aggressive confidence underlying their predictions. Again, in their time, as socialist mobilization was booming, to doubt the onset of socialism was like being the skunk at the garden party, but this was a political prejudice transformed into ideological dogma. It depended on optimism for the prospects of socialist parties throughout Europe, whose electoral totals were blowing up, for a while at least.

Remind me, who are the utopians again?

The idea of the surplus is compelling. For me it goes to the appealing Marxian idea of alienation: that workers produce a world they do not control, conditions of existence that oppress them. Though in this respect it is not the surplus but the entirety of output that is in question. There are other aspects of Marx I find illuminating, as I’ve been writing here for a while now and will revisit.

You could say only the surplus — conceived in aggregate, economy-wide terms — is a preeminent question of economic policy, one in which workers have no say, but that should also follow for total output, not just however you define the surplus. The ‘V’ in the Marxist economic layout, known as “variable capital,” which includes wages, is of just as much interest as the ‘S’ and ‘C’ (fixed capital). The rate of surplus value (S divided by C plus V) matters for historical development, but so do C and V separately.

A sub-topic in the economics was the expectation of an ever-widening gulf between those who held property, sometimes describes as “idlers,” and those compelled to work for a living. Edward Bernstein in “Evolutionary Socialism” takes some time to dispel this misconception. The political perversity in the premise lies in the idea that eventually, the entire society would be divided into proletarians and capitalists. The numerical advantage for the working class would inevitably prove to be decisive. Our own U.S. populists adopted the same idea in their slogans referring to “tramps and millionaires.” Our ultra-lefts harbor fantasies of mass uprisings by an overwhelming majority of the impoverished.

The “middle class” has certainly shrunk and economic troubles still afflict working people, but we are a long way from the stark economic divide foreseen a hundred years ago. And forget about what the working class is actually thinking. I hate to even bring it up, but there are also the observations to the effect that the Left, and not just in the U.S., increasingly consists of the better-off, educated classes, and the Right does the contrary. The class polarization thesis, cousin to theories of pauperization or immiseration, fails both on empirical economic grounds and in political terms.

I’d like to try and put a better face on all this. The class struggles inherent in capitalism have spilled out over the entire globe, with the spread of manufacturing to the global south. Perhaps the rise of the PRC is the real fulfillment of Marx’s scenario. The contradiction between productive forces and ordinary security is expressed in existential, ecological terms. Climate change induces migration that creates crises in the rich nations to which the dispossessed attempt to relocate. I’m still kicking all this around, but for now I have to leave it for future posts.