Read this: I don’t want this to turn into a struggle session so please do not engage in such a way.
Does Marxism being “scientific” matter? Or does this need to want to cling to science to prove its legitimacy actually hinder its effect? I’ve been wrestling with this question for the past day and I still don’t have a concrete opinion.
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.
Marxism is a scientific approach.
Much of what we take for granted in science today remains fundamentally incomplete, yet it does not mean immense practical values cannot be derived from them. They are (imperfect) models that inform our understanding of reality. Newtonian physics break down at the sub-atomic level, yet it does not stop Humanity from inventing spacecrafts capable of landing on the Moon within meters of accuracy.
The proof is in the pudding: Marxism-Leninism remains the only strain of socialism that has achieved lasting success that resulted in the establishment of Actually Existing Socialist states, as flawed as they can be.
It is important to remember that no other form of socialist ideologies over the past two centuries have come even remotely close to replicating the success of Marxism-Leninism, most of which either never got off the ground, collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions, or were immediately crushed by bourgeois counter-revolutions.
The scientific approach of Marxism as such leads to potential solutions. You cannot defeat capitalism by telling people that “capitalism is bad”, just like you cannot possibly try to cure diseases by telling people “don’t get sick”.
Moralism can be useful but the actual solutions toward such emancipatory project can only come from a systematic understanding of how capitalism functions, where its weaknesses are at (the contradictions underlying the formation of capital) and how it can potentially be exploited. Marxism-Leninism, or scientific socialism, are tools that enable strategic planning and inform practice.
Similarly, the building of a socialist economy can only be feasible by understanding where capitalism has failed. Without which, the overthrow of capitalist regimes itself does not solve the actual economics problems and as such, will not lead to the emancipation of the human society.
That’s where it’s uniquely suited to my scientific work. As far as I’ve read, there are only three formally declared laws in Marx/Engels’ work which Engels ascribed to dialectical materialism: the transformation of quantity into quality, the interpenetration of opposites, and the negation of the negation. Using Marxism as an analytical tool in my scientific work, those three laws are essential considerations. I have to understand why something is the way it is and what changing a variable will do to it and everything it interacts with. Using Marxism as my overall ontological system, they mesh perfectly with my scientific worldview. Everything is a dynamic subject in a greater ecosystem bound to thermodynamics. I can’t take an idea from Capital and apply it 1:1 as a law of modern economics, but goddamn their philosophical work holds up beautifully in the natural sciences and is only hamstrung by being the first real attempt at studying those things in a radical way.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think we may agree more than you think: the laws you mention aren’t laws in the scientific sense of the word; instead, they’re a technique (dialectics) for investigating the world. I agree that it is a very powerful technique, that’s what I meant when I said that Marxism is best thought of as a methodology than a science. You said it yourself when you called Marxism “an analytical tool”. You can use it to do science, but its not a science per se