Letter to the editor: Is Marxism scientific socialism?
Sir,
Through the columns of your esteemed daily, I wish to draw public attention towards a topic that is oft quoted but seldom read and consequently widely misunderstood and conflated: Marxism. The ideology has enjoyed appreciable scholarly endorsement and intellectual championing because it’s widely held to be “scientific,” a notion neither entirely misplaced nor concrete. I aim to dispel the prevalent misconception as well as wipe the dust of time off some potentially more viable candidates for the “scientific in approach” label, who albeit having fallen into oblivion were the progenitors of socialism.
I shed light on a forgotten political movement and ideology, that of utopian socialism, exercises in which were also prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th century Utah, a now forgotten facet of the state’s sociopolitical history.
I deem it relevant to address the apparent historo-ideological amnesia regarding Marxism, amongst self-proclaimed proponents, practitioners, and opponents alike, given the indiscriminate rise of the free market in the formerly communist bloc. It becomes particularly pertinent to question if the oft-misused term “Marxism” has become merely a ruse for sociopolitical fascism.
Utopian socialists do not believe that any form of class struggle or political revolution is necessary for socialism. They neither advocated the acute usurping of the existent socioeconomic order nor shared the Marxist disdain and alienation of the bourgeoisie. They feel their form of cooperative, harmonious socialism can be established among likeminded people within the existing society and that their small communities can illustrate the feasibility of their plan for society. “Utopian socialism” is a label used to define the first currents of modern socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier et al, and is neither identifiable as either wholly reform or revolution but a pioneering idea that’s peacefully idealistic rather than gradual and compromising but also grassroots and participative rather than passive. In fact, the very word “communism” and the idea of egalitarian community settlements that became communes were coined by these philanthropic pacifist premarxist socialists. They were labeled by Marxists with the pejoratively intended term “utopian” with invariably negative connotations of foolhardiness and idealistic naïveté because they didn’t advocate revolution but bequeathed austerity and benevolence on the part of the affluent to sustain the society and alleviate disparity therein.
In order to justify the scientific method, scientists assume the elementary dogma that there exists an objective reality governed by natural laws. The aforementioned laws can be discovered by means of systematic observation. Science, thus, can be generalized as the development of a universal theoretical framework, borne of consistent empirical observations of phenomena, which can thus deterministically predict a consequent, given a set of preconditions. Science systematizes knowledge gained from observation in the form of objective norms and mathematical paradigms, thus constituting a self-consistent and further experimentally verifiable (or logically falsifiable) doctrinal corpus explaining by reproducible experimentation how nature works.
Both the terms “scientific socialism” and “utopian socialism, and the historic ideological divide thereof, were popularized by Marxists in order to highlight and segregate the purported realism of their own doctrine from that of the early idealist, pacifist strains of socialism that predated and even partly inspired them. Marx and Engels identified with the term “scientific” as they propounded that their method was based on repeated historic observation and recurrence of certain trend and phenomenon, to the extent of reliable generalization, for the future of human civilization. When a certain norm exhibited consistency in myriad historical events, it could be safely generalized and its infallible applicability be extended to all of the chronology of human civilization (past, present, and future) and thus be used to safely predict and foresay future watersheds.
Frederick Engels in his work “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” writes, “The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property…. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and this the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism.”
A statement or theory possesses the attribute of falsifiability if it can be contradicted by a basic statement that corresponds to an observation. Philosopher Karl Popper proposed that theories that are not falsifiable are unscientific. Thus on the same grounds that the Big Bang Theory was deemed rigorously unqualified to be science, the courageous, precarious, and unverifiable grounds of so-called scientific socialism mandate a leap of faith, which disqualifies its self-christening as “scientific.”
Moving from a series of statements such as “here is a white swan,” “over there is a white swan,” and so on to a universal statement such as “all swans are white” is deductively invalid since it’s always possible that there may be a non-white swan that has eluded observation. By the same reasoning, a single counterexample suffices to refute the purely theoretical speculations asserted vehemently by Marx, even more prone as they are so specific, narrow, and stringent as employing instance-specific, indefinite, and synthetic terminology as “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie.” Marx’s daring and stark assumption of “historicism”, i.e. the method of analyzing historical trends and deriving universal laws from them, is unscientific as its claims cannot be tested and in particular are not subject to being disproven — that is, they don’t bear privy to being empirically disproved and hence aren’t answerable to experimentation.
Besides the aforementioned reasoning, the abject lack of existence of such a methodological premise mandates the so-called scientific socialism as unscientific.
In light of the aforementioned arguments, it does well to reconsider Engels’ own words: “Modern materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which Nature also has its history in time, the celestial bodies, like the organic species…. That which still survives of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its law — formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of Nature and history.”
Engels clearly conflates a very rough, broad, and unsystematic recurrence of certain conveniently selected phenomenon with scientific consistency of well defined empirical trials in well documented systematic lab conditions. Periodicity and mere invariability of application of natural laws is homologically mistaken for historical recurrence.
Engels further states, “From that time forward, Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie…. These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a science.”
Clearly, Engels treats specific, ill-defined subjective non-universal conceptions — terms like “proletariat,” “bourgeoisie,” “capitalist,” and “surplus value” — to generalize a scientific norm. A statement is strict or pure if it does not use any individual name. Popper propounded that a law of nature cannot refer to particular things. The sentence, “This apple is attracted by the planet Earth,” is not a scientific statement. Popper considered the distinction between universal and individual concepts or names to be of fundamental importance, a distinction that Marxists have since recklessly disregarded in their indiscriminate terming of their vague subjectivism as science.
Was utopian socialism more scientific?
Scientific socialism’s methodology for understanding and predicting socioeconomic and material phenomena relied exclusively on examining their historical trends in order to foretell outcomes and probable future developments that led to their faith that a proletarian uprising would transpire anyhow but had no empirically verifiable basis while utopian settlements stood subject to trial, as they’d attempted establishment of such settlements intended as experimental colonies — thus constituting a practical trial in implementation and realization of their beliefs.
Robert Owen was a successful Welsh businessman who devoted much of his profits to ameliorating the lives of his workers. He introduced shorter working hours and schools for children and renovated housing. He also set up an Owenite commune called New Harmony in Indiana.
Charles Fourier’s writings about turning work into play influenced the young Marx and helped him devise his theory of alienation. Fourier invented the concept of phalanstère, units of people based on a theory of passions and of their combination. Several colonies based on Fourier’s ideas were later founded in the United States. Étienne Cabet’s attempts to form real socialist communities based on his ideas through the Icarian movement did not survive. But one such community was the precursor of Corning, Iowa. Possibly inspired by Christianity, he coined the word “communism” and influenced other thinkers, including Marx. The Brotherhood Church in Britain and the Life and Labor Commune in Russia were based on the Christian anarchist ideas of Tolstoy.
In the Utah town of Eureka, a mining community southwest of Salt Lake City, there were two Christian-Socialist Baptist ministers, Charles McHarkness and C.C. Stillman. A town of 3,000 people, Eureka had a 300-strong local socialist party in 1910. It’s a testimony to the all-pervasiveness of the socialist colonial waves sweeping the continent. Drawing on the traditional doctrine of Christian socialism, Utah Christian socialists preached a message that combined Marxism and the teachings of the Gospels, fostering a vision of Christianity that valued cooperation, the welfare and needs of the community prioritized over the individual, concern and action for the impoverished, and crusading for equality as it pertains to power and wealth.
Thus, the so-called utopian socialists who established experimental communities were, in fact, trying to apply the scientific method by putting their beliefs to trial and methodically conducting an experiment in implementation; meanwhile, the scientific ones made unfounded yet firm and specific proclamations and universal predictions about the future, substantiated only by vague subjectivism. Resignedly and almost in a laissez-faire mannerism, they delineated an inevitable proletarian uprising as if it were a universal truth. Marxists rebuked and chastised their predecessors for their lack of pragmatism and compulsion and deemed the ongoing, long-begun class struggle imminent to culminate in an unavoidable revolution and subsequent overthrowal of the ruling class. This prophesization was only loosely substantiated but firmly convicted as a surefire norm akin to natural physical laws.
On the other hand, contrary to the unfounded hypothesizations of the so-called scientific socialists, who spoke of the predetermined nature of their proclamations with a veritable prophetic conviction, premarxian utopian socialists of the 18th and 19th centuries conformed to the scientific method by actually putting their theoretical ideas to test and into practice by setting up ambitious autonomous entities akin to experimental systems. Marx had reduced the scope of the consequentiality of human action to mere gospel preaching and dissemination of this theory to the masses.
As the final nail in the coffin and final mark of attestation to their rivals, in their seminal “Communist Manifesto,” Marx and Engels stated, “The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms … they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.”
Thus, Marx and Engels inadvertently admit their own lack of fundamental understanding of the scientific method by denouncing empiricism and ridiculing experimentation.
I’m hoping my letter will help ease and melt molds on either side of the political spectrum and help mobilize mass opinion to view various strains of socialism in their individual nuances and a more neutral, critical perspective.
Thanking You,
Yours Sincerely,
Pitamber Kaushik
Bokaro, India
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
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Maybe 2 people in Washington County would be able to understand your article. I prefer Groucho Marx. Your on planet academia. I honestly could not keep up with it, let alone get to the end. I am sure there is a journal out there where this belongs. What we have here is a failure to communicate. Please rewrite your article and bring it down to Earth.