It being “scientific” is less about matching the scientific method as we were taught in school. It’s meant to differentiate it from utopian socialism (e.g. everyone will be equal with infinite food and resources) and idealism (e.g. great men changed history because he was a very good speaker). Scientific socialism, or Marxism, is supposed to be grounded in reality, e.g. the world is influenced by many things, but primarily what people need and how those needs are produced and met. That being said, we still observe Marxist critiques, observations, and methods being “replicable” throughout history.

In addition, Sociologists still use Marxist theories and methods in everything but name because they’re simply the best, and even the smarter capitalists use Marxist analysis to help generate profit because Marx’s work was largely about explaining how capitalism works and fails.

And yes, it does matter. We have instances of people who claim to be Marxists and yet fall to unscientific, utopian visions and committed atrocities because of it. For example, Shining Path, Pol Pot, PatSocs/MAGA communism, and various Maoist cults. Some of these were indeed western intelligence plots such as Pol Pot and the GLADIO fascist maoism movement, but the point is that without adhering to the scientific foundations, you are left with gibberish recitations of writers with little substance in practice. Not to mention, you will fall to the liberal recuperation of history and figures.

Another more light hearted example would be The Boondocks. Great show, but even though the main character is a communist and portrayed as the smartest one, the show still paints ‘bad culture’ as the driving force of society.

Science is an effort to understand the laws of motion and processes of change, describing them in a naturalistic rather than metaphysical way.

Marxism is a social science that describes the process of change in human society, viewing political change as motion in a historical process.

Marxism is also a political critique, revealing and assessing modern power and politics by stripping them of their idealisms and putting them into their historical context, unmasking their brutality and injustice.

Revolutionary Marxism takes this understanding of change as a product of certain natural laws of human society, and then seeks to transcend them in the same way the human understanding of evolution or agriculture can be used to transcend certain evils of the natural world.

You can take Marxism as a science or as a critique, it’s both.

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Imo Marxism should be understood as scientific but not a true science.

People get caught up in defending or debunking the idea of Marxism as a science. It’s not physics, it never will be and that’s okay. Lots of things are scientific without being a science, depending on exactly how you choose to draw those boundaries, and in fact a lot of the soft science is scientific without necessarily being a science. But what soft sciences can yield with regards to information and insight and analysis is still invaluable and irreplaceable, even if it isn’t on the same tier as chemistry.

Usually when people try to debunk Marxism as a science they are either paraphrasing the Popperian critique of Marxism or they are regurgitating someone else’s paraphrasing of the Popperian critique. If anyone ever starts talking falsifiability in a discussion of Marxism and its scientific approach you can immediately discount this person because this is a trash argument; plenty of things that exist squarely within the domains of hard science are not falsifiable themselves and plenty of things that are a part of science happened outside of the scientific method. So basically by Popper attempting to exclude Marxism (and psychoanalysis) from his definition of science, he made it so narrow as to exclude large swathes of science itself. If someone wants to pick that particular hill to die on then that’s their prerogative but doing so makes that person more anti-science than the person who considers Marxism as a true science imo.

But this is all an inherently negative project. Marxism holds a lot of descriptive and predictive power. Like anything to do with people and politics and economics, it’s never going to be absolute and it’s always going to be messy and whatever you use to analyse this stuff will necessarily be incomplete and imperfect. But the negative project of attempting to disprove Marxism being scientific/a science isn’t about improving upon it or contributing to how it analyses the word, instead it’s just an attempt to undermine or negate the importance people place on Marxism by gatekeeping and trying to cast it as being undeserving of the prestige that scientific endeavours are given.

If you want to head off a discussion that is going this direction you can foreshadow them being about to discard a large part of the sciences, as mentioned above, or you can ask the person if there are any aspects of Marxism that are scientific to draw out their ignorance on the topic or you can ask them how they think Marxism could become more scientific. This usually stumps the anti-Marxists.

But ultimately Marxism doesn’t need to be a true science to be scientific and it doesn’t need to be a true science in order to be an extremely valuable way of analysing the world so I generally don’t bother with discussions about whether or not Marxism is a science because the majority of people who want a debate on these matters have near-zero awareness of philosophy of science so the discussion amounts to watching someone wade around in the shallow end while they play pretend and convince themselves that they have some epic gotcha when really they don’t.

Not trying to imply that this is what you’re are doing right here in your post but it’s something that’s pretty common amongst critics of Marxism. It’s a bit like people who argue that Marx’s approach was based on an incomplete or a flawed anthropology. That might well be true and I’m very interested in hearing the critiques of Marx’s anthropological foundation but just because the starting point was wrong or inaccurate doesn’t mean that where it goes and what conclusions Marx draws are therefore equally as flawed or false.

To illustrate this point a little bit, imagine if I encountered a car for the first time in my life and I pulled the engine apart and studied how it functions to conclude that there must be microscopic gremlins that push the pistons which create the force that cause the driveshaft to rotate which transfers the energy to eventually propel the wheels into motion. Obviously the starting point of my analysis is completely incorrect and it’s downright unscientific in the most extreme way. But my understanding of the mechanical principles of what happens beyond the cylinders is accurate. This means that we can improve my theory but it doesn’t mean that every conclusion I arrive at after the microscopic gremlins is therefore as incorrect as my starting point is.

Marxism only has validity to me over other ideologies because it’s a scientisation of philosophy and philosophisation of science. It should be an interface between the two that provides the extra contextual lenses for an observation or idea, while also challenging your initial perception of that thing to remove any idealism or vulgar materialism from your critique. Every idea I write has to make sense in the greater body of ideas I know to be the least-wrong interpretation of the world and it has to stand up to the peer review of other communists doing that thing. While Marxism isn’t a science in itself, like horticulture or ecology I’m drawn to it because it’s the most interdisciplinary attempt at applying a scientific worldview to a wildly complex system. I’m always considering the extra intersectional angles and checking to see that what I believe as a Marxist is what I believe as a scientist to refine both.

It’s probably not a science, using a falsifiability criterion for “science”. (See Popper.) I don’t think that’s controversial – Marxist informed hypotheses could be tested and discarded perhaps, not Marxism itself.

Because it’s more than that. It’s a explanatory model, it’s a body of knowledge, with core normative concerns and areas of study. It is, god forbid, a practice; it isn’t a disembodied law which regulates the world unarticulated, but which has been apprehended at a particular historical moment, and which motivates and creates a World precisely because it has been apprehended and articulated. (I would conceive of this as it’s dialectical character.)

It’s not poorer for this; its just a different kind of thing.

I'd be curious to read anyone's opinions on a traditional, Hegelian inflected Marxism with "analytic Marxism" (I've not read Cohen; I wonder if he tries to "ground" Marxism in more "common sensical" empiricism, and whether this makes it more similar to falsifiable science). 

Not only is it scientific, not only is it science, it is the scientific method. Or rather, Marxism (dialectical materialism) as a philosophy contains the scientific method - as a justified part of a whole philosophy, rather than a free-floating ‘neat idea’ as it is for capitalist scientists.

To a dialectical materialist, the only way to understand the world, i.e. develop a theory about it, is through practice in the world. Practice and theory form an inseparable dialectical union. Make a theory, test it in practice, revise the theory, revise the tests, iterate again and again until you can fully describe the phenomenon you’re studying.

Marx and Engels expressed this as part of the philosophy of dialectical materialism, an advancement beyond Hegel’s dialectical idealism, and then used these methods to study economic relations and the society that results from them. But dialectical materialism goes beyond the theories of political economy that Marx developed using it, even if the search for answers about political economy was what caused Marx to develop it in the first place.

If this formula (theorize, test, theorize) seems completely obvious as the only way to generate knowledge about the world, it’s only because most competing philosophies of knowledge have fallen by the wayside. But even so, this is not actually the dominant understanding in the world today, because all bourgeoise science eventually has to blind itself to reality, smudge its own results and ignore the real explanations of phenomena in order to justify its own existence. And even when scientists do manage to follow this method, either through principle or in a field that capitalist ideology doesn’t need to corrupt, an understanding of dialectics gives it a much deeper and richer meaning.

Only under dialectical materialism, the proper philosophy of the working class, is true science even possible. And the results speak for themselves, because an advantage in creating true knowledge about the world gives an advantage in controlling the phenomena of the world, so throughout history, socialist nations have made strides in scientific progress, matched by strides in industial progress, far in advance of what the capitalists can achieve.

Marxism doesn’t have a “need to cling to” science. It simply is scientific in its nature. The lack of materialism in other ideologies is why they are broken.

If you ask a Marxist what they believe they will give you a concrete answer with definitive and measurable outcomes eg. public ownership of the means of production.

If you ask a liberal they give you undefinable, unmeasurable, and/or contradicting plans like freedom, equality, protection of personal property.

Define “freedom” How can people be free if they are not free to take other peoples property? How can everyone be equal if some people have all the stuff and aren’t forced to give some of it away? These ideals can not be upheld because they are undefined.

Define “matter”

imo treating it as a science does more to hurt the purpose of Marxism than it helps

marx and engel’s project was originally conceived as a science in the true sense of the word, in the way we would consider physics or biology to be a science. But forcing abstract, universal laws (something which is essential to science) onto human civilization and development is extremely difficult, if not impossible to do in a productive way. More to the point, even within a single mode of production, the actual conditions on the ground at any given point will differ enormously, so any general doctrine will either lead you in the wrong direction or be abstracted to the point of being useless. Therefore, its more useful to think of Marxism as a methodology, not a science. Treating it this way keeps you in tune with the needs of the current place and time, and less focused on what should be happening according to abstract laws.

In addition, treating it as a science has the negative side of downplaying the moral force of socialism. No one I’ve met is socialist because they’ve been convinced by Marx’s syllogism showing the inevitable decline of capitalism and rise of socialism. Rather, when you get down to it, people are socialists because they believe it to be the only way to create an ethical society. It is this moral force that represents the single greatest strength of any left politics, tbh. Treating Marxism as a science necessarily means you have to devalue that aspect.

Science is the business of trying to identify and systematize patterns in how the world changes over time. Marxism does that, and I think the emphasis on “how the world changes over time” dovetails nicely with dialectical materialism itself. That said, lots of other things are also attempting to identify the same thing (to a greater or lesser degree of success), so I don’t think it’s an incredibly precise descriptor. “Good science or bad science?” is much more informative than “science or not-science?” The demarcation problem is just bullshit.