Science and Marxism

[Maz]

Maoists generally say that theory needs to be throroughly scientific. And to this I agree. You need to be ruthlessly scientific in order to understand the system you want to destroy and to formulate the stragegies for destroying it.

But, part of me thinks that part of our politics cannot be reduced to science, namely, the motivation for doing all this. Scientifically, there is a material basis for communism, and scientifically, MLM is the most advanced understanding we have of how to get there, but can the choice to move towards communism be considered scientific?

In other words, can the preferability of communism vs. capitalism be objectively determined?

Now, many might say, does it matter? I basically say 'no', it doesn't, even if it is an arbitrary choice, it's one that we still must make. However, I'm interested in the repercussions of this, namely, where does the arbitrariness end, how do we know what are scientific questions and what are not, etc.

thoughts?

P.S. or is this pointless academics, and if so, why?

[eat the world]

there are at least three different parts to ideology.

1) class stand
2) method
3) theory

of them, the most dynamic (according to the Four in China) is theory.

Some things about this:

There is a long history in the U.S. "movement" of replacing ideological and political struggle with moralistic "gut checking" -- i.e. making "stand" key, and separating it (metaphysically) from consciousness, method and theory. I.e. challenging people constantly "are you down?" and "are you committed enough?" or "Are you scared?" or "Are you putting the people above self?"

And these are not irrelevent questions. But motivation is not walled off from ideological and political understanding. They have some different dynamics (which is what you seem to be addressing) but they are connected.

Put another way: revisionism always glorifies "class instinct" or "class feelings" of the active workers. But it has historically been a way of promoting a philistine lack of interest in theory, and an economist assumption that "workers just know" without needing to struggle to raise their understanding to the level of serious, scientific, Marxist analysis.

Does that get at some of your issues, Maz?

[redstar2000]

Maz wrote: how do we know what are scientific questions and what are not?...

I think Karl Popper had a good answer to this one: a scientific hypothesis is one that can potentially be falsified by evidence.

The "God hypothesis" can never be falsified; any failure to produce evidence for "God" can always be "refuted" by inventing another "attribute" of "God" that "explains" the lack of evidence.

God-suckers always say "prove God doesn't exist"...something that can never be done.

This, the "God hypothesis" is plainly unscientific.

The transition from capitalism to communism is a falsifiable hypothesis...in the long run. If, after another two or three or four centuries, some form of capitalism continues to flourish and communists are still a small number of "cranks" on message boards (or whatever they have then), then a rational person would conclude that Marx was hopelessly wrong about the future of human society.

"Waiting for communism" would sink to the level of "waiting for the rapture".

Right now, I think Marx is looking "pretty robust"--there's accumulating evidence that supports his hypothesis. But there are nagging problems about the labor theory of value...so it's not, from a scientific standpoint, "settled".

In the event of successful proletarian revolution in several advanced capitalist societies and the subsequent establishment of viable classless societies, then (and only then) will we be able to say with reasonable certainty Marx was right.

Maz wrote: But, part of me thinks that part of our politics cannot be reduced to science, namely, the motivation for doing all this.

If communism is perceived as the liberation of the individual from the chains of wage-slavery, then the struggle for communism becomes a way of "being free" subjectively while still objectively in chains.

The chattel slave thought of running away or, in some cases, of open rebellion before doing either of those things...s/he had to stop being a slave subjectively before self-liberation could become an objective possibility.

This is kind of important. If you have the (romantic) desire to strike the chains from others...it may not really change things as much as you'd hoped. People who are liberated by others may still behave "as if" they were slaves...it can take generations for consciousness to "catch up" with being.

Marx's hypothesis was that, over time, workers would perceive the need for their "self-emancipation"...would learn their real class interests from their objective conditions and act accordingly. He thought that communists could "speed up" this process, could "shorten the labor & lessen the birth pains" of the new society.

That hasn't happened yet either.

But there's some encouraging, if indirect, evidence. When 20th century communists made revolutions in backward, pre-capitalist societies, their policies of economic development "shortened the labor & lessened the birth pains" of capitalism.

Things were pretty bad for workers in Stalin's Russia...but a lot better than Victoria's England or Napoleon III's France.

Things were pretty bad for workers in Mao's China...but a lot better than Nehru's India.

Things are not so great for workers in Cuba...but then look at Mexico!

So how will communists do in the 21st or 22nd century? We don't know...but it might well be better than many expect.

[Deleted]

I'm glad Karl Popper was brought up, I use his standard as well.

[romanmeal]

REDSTAR SAYS:
“Maz wrote: how do we know what are scientific questions and what are not?...

I think Karl Popper had a good answer to this one: a scientific hypothesis is one that can potentially be falsified by evidence.

The "God hypothesis" can never be falsified; any failure to produce evidence for "God" can always be "refuted" by inventing another "attribute" of "God" that "explains" the lack of evidence.

God-suckers always say "prove God doesn't exist"...something that can never be done.

This, the "God hypothesis" is plainly unscientific.” (REDSTAR2000)

There is a lot that I think is confused here. And, I am not going to untangle it all. I will start by saying that I think that verificationism (including fallible-ism) has all kinds of problems. In the past century, there is a big literature in the philosophy and history of science of refuting and finding counterexamples to this way of thinking about how science works.

There are a whole host of problems surrounding this kind of view: Schlick’s reductio of induction, the new problems of induction, the problem of theory-ladeness of observation, incommensurability.. These issues are very complex. But even more importantly, views like Popper’s just doesn’t reflect how science is really practiced. And, Popper’s Fallible-ism doesn’t answer Maz’s question. Why? Because, the class of fallible hypothesises is much greater than the class of hypothesises we would reasonably call “scientific”. There are an infinite number of absurd claims that are nonetheless fallible, for example: “Green men live in my shoe”. There are also an infinite number of mundane and irrelevant claims that are fallible, for example: “Bob uses a brick as a paperweight”.

There are all kinds of fallible statements. The point is that they are not RELEVENT.

Even if fallible-ism were true(which it isn‘t), fallible-ism isn’t enough. Scientists don’t go prod on randomly falsifying all the absurd, mundane, irrelevant hypothesises they can think of. They investigate within a framework of relevance; they investigate within a social, historical, and epistemic framework. And, the frameworks are gray and sloppy. There is no single criterion to measure if a hypothesis is more scientific than another.

On tangential note, even those who still embrace verificationism or confirmationism in phi of science, usually recognize it isn’t the whole story. They usually add “explanatory power” into the mix. So a theory is scientific or true to the degree it is confirmed and to the degree of its explanatory power. And, usually, explanatory power will take care of the relevance issue. The problem is in defining and quantifying explanatory power.

I really recommend reading works in the history of science or philosophical works in the history of science, like Thomas Kuhn or Paul Feyerbend. I think when you get into the details of science, you see how little science follows the simplistic Baconian -positivist picture of observation/generalization or hypothesis/test. Popper thought Marxism (and psychoanalysis btw) wasn’t scientific for similar reasons to those Redstar expressed about “the God hypothesis”. But, I think Popper was holding Marxism up to an unfair standard. If you look to the history of physics, there are always anomalies and phenomena that can’t be explained by the current paradigm. If you measured Newtonian physics or relativity or the cosmological theories now, they too, would not be truly scientific. Why? Because, they also tend, when faced with anomalies, to explain them away within the current paradigm. To think of Marxism as a “hard science like physics” is kind of backwards. Rather, physics as it really exists is more like Marxism and the social sciences.

[redstar2000]

romanmeal: *sliced and diced redstar2000 into small pieces*

And did a most elegant job of it.

Clearly your knowledge of these matters is vastly superior to my own.

It would be helpful, therefore, if you could set forth your own "guidelines" for distinguishing between a scientific hypothesis and one that is non-scientific.

Obviously, it would have to exclude trivial hypotheses that you suggest Popper would allow.

And it would have to include explanatory powers that Popper overlooked.

It would also have to allow for Kuhn's "paradigm effect" on the formulation of hypotheses.

Or is it your opinion that the question itself is really a "meaningless" one--I believe that "post-modernists" hold to the view that "science" is "just another" social construct with no "independent validity".

For what it's worth, I agree with Popper about psychoanalysis (not scientific) and disagree with him about Marxism (scientific). But your post has made the limb I crawled out on feel a lot shakier than I thought it was.

[Maz]

eat the world: My questions mostly come from a conversation i'm having with a comrade about Bob Avakian. He is very "down" with a lot of things, but he was a little turned off by what he saw as some idealism in BA, mostly in how he thought he was sometimes framing things in terms of good versus evil (I think he was getting this impression from bullets). Anyways, it got me thinking about how those "being down" questions aren't the same kind of questions as what constitutes an imperialist country, for example. But your response is interesting, maybe part of my problem is looking at "science" more the way the bourgeoisie does - as something analytical applied to nature only. Like, there is a real material basis for things like "serve the people", it's not emotionalism (from a perspective of proletarian science, anyways). But it ain't exactly like saying the earth revolves around the sun either.

I have a lot of thinking to do. Are there any texts that deal with this sort of thing?

Romanmeal: A lot of what you say is interesting, but much of it also pretty incomprehensible for those of us without a background in philosophy of science. Is there any way you can "translate" that into a "dialect" that the rest of us can understand?