Groucho Marxism

Scientific socialism is a term popularized by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to describe their socio-political approach, which aims to apply the scientific method to the analysis of society. It contrasts with utopian socialism by basing itself upon material conditions instead of conceptions and ideas. Thus, scientific socialism takes a materialist approach to the analysis of society whereas utopian socialism takes an idealist approach. The distinction between the two provides a useful way to answer the question of whether socialism and Marxism are synonymous; the answer is clearly not, as utopian socialists are socialists but not Marxists. The modern meaning of the term scientific socialism is based almost entirely on Engels’s 1880 book Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.

Whether Marx and Engels were truly scientists in the widely understood sense of the term is open to debate. Personally, though, I believe they were. Their dialectical materialist approach foreshadowed many ideas in the modern scientific field that we call complex systems, as I outlined in a previous blog post. For example, the dialectical materialist concept of conversion of quantity into quality is almost identical to the complex systems concept of a critical transition or bifurcation point. And the dialectical materialist idea that all things are interconnected and interdependent, and that a system can only be understood in relation to its environment and other systems, is also considered central to complex systems theory.

This is all the more remarkable when you consider this field only began to be developed in the 1940s, 80 years after Marx wrote volume 1 of Das Kapital. The view of society as a complex system has important consequences for assessing the likelihood of critical transitions such as revolutions. One of the key insights from complex systems theory is that it is almost impossible to accurately predict the behaviour of large, interconnected systems with many feedback loops. Anyone who says that a revolution is impossible either doesn’t understand complex systems or is talking out of their backside. This isn’t to say that a revolution will definitely occur any time soon; just that nobody knows for sure if and when one will occur.

Another reason I think it is legitimate to call Marx a scientist is that he made testable predictions. For example, he predicted that the rate of profit would fall over time, which has since been validated empirically, as I explained in a previous blog post. He also predicted that capitalism would be prone to crises, which has been emphatically borne out by subsequent events. His most famous prediction, that capitalism would eventually collapse and give way to socialism, has not come to pass (yet). But part of the reason for that is that this prediction became self-refuting. The idea that capitalism might collapse has led the ruling to class do everything it can to prop up the system and stop that happening, from making concessions to workers in the post-war period to bailing out bankers after the 2008 crash.

I don’t think Marx gets the credit he deserves given how accurate his predictions have turned out to be. The reason is that, largely through the magic of propaganda, Marx has come to be seen by many as the architect of several crimes against humanity, such as the Russian famine of the 1930s and the Chinese famine of the 1950s. But these events occurred decades after Marx’s death and blaming Marx for them makes about as much sense as blaming Jesus for the crusades. Just as there is nothing in the teachings of Jesus that would lead anyone to commit crimes against humanity, neither is there anything in the writings of Marx that would lead anyone to commit such crimes. Even so, the name Marx now carries negative connotations for many people.

Another reason people tend to discount or ignore Marx’s insights is that they assume they are no longer relevant. But his insights are just as relevant today as they were when he was making them 150 years ago. They will always be relevant as long as we live under capitalism, and will only stop being relevant once we get rid of capitalism for good and replace it with socialism. Nonetheless, given how loaded the terms ‘Marx’ and ‘Marxism’ have become, perhaps there would be some value in us Marxists re-branding ourselves as ‘scientific socialists’. As we have seen, all Marx and his long-time collaborator Engels were really trying to do was apply a scientific approach to the analysis of society – and who would argue with that?