Is Marxism a science? Flowers for Marx provides us an excellent window into this live debate, as it exists on the contemporary Left, through a series of essays that can roughly be split into two camps: Democratic Socialism as exemplified by frequent Jacobin commentators Matthew McManus and Ben Burgis, and a position somewhere between Marxist-Lenininsm and Third Worldism found in the authors Conrad Hamilton and Ernesto Vargas. For sure, these two sides differ on just about everything, from the question of continuity versus rupture between bourgeois society and any future socialism to the historical legacy of actually existing communism to their theoretical methods. Yet, strangely enough, the authors do have one thing in common: neither side seems to want to whole-heartedly defend the position that Marxism is, or should be, a science.

The most interesting parts of the review for me is the critique of Burgis (the unfortunate legacy of Michael Brooks):

The rejection by Cohen of the labor theory of value, Marx’s understanding of exploitation, and things of that nature in favor of “more recent social science” is a very fruitful place to begin considering where the last section of the book left off. This is a rejection of Althusser’s aforementioned theory of heterodox science, but also, importantly, a rejection of the notion that Marxism constitutes its own field of social science at all. This “recent social science” is, in effect, going on somewhere else as a part of the proper social division of labor, Marxist critics on the one hand, and actual social scientists on the other. Marxists should, according to the Analytical Marxists, outsource their understanding of the real world to responsible academics doing neoclassical economics or post-structuralist history and so on.

Frankly, it’s somewhat insulting to compare this sort of relationship to social science to that of Marx’s in the reading room of the British Museum, as Burgis does. Marx painstakingly worked to verify and appraise every claim made by bourgeois political economists. I don’t say this lightly. But it’s the thought I keep coming to after being consistently confronted with Jacobin columnists’ attempt to speak authoritatively on social science and history while making very obvious mistakes and oversights. Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix, for example, claimed to defend structuralist understandings of class, but seemed to have been written in total ignorance as to what structures or structuralism are. Seth Ackerman, in his high profile debate with Robert Brenner over the rate of profit,[7] botched his empirical debunking because he hadn’t fully read the paper he was citing as proof of changing depreciation rates.[8]

And now we have this essay by Burgis who, in writing on the necessity of revising views in light of new evidence, appears to have taken an extremely naive epistemological position about social science, rarely checking the accuracy of claims, particularly those found in secondary sources which support his side in this debate.

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Similarly, Burgis goes on to cite Jacobin editor Mike Beggs for the rather incredulous claim that the classical political economists had a totally foreign notion of supply and demand such that we should put no stock into Marx’s critique of supply and demand, the critique being that they only determine temporary divergences from an equilibrium price. Beggs says, pointing to a quote from Marx, that the classical political economists thought about supply and demand in terms of “forces” or “quantities” of goods and not schedules or curves as us moderns do with our fancy Marshallian cross. It doesn’t seem to occur to Beggs that (1) these two descriptions are effectively equivalent as the classicals were quite capable of imagining hypothetical increases in supply versus demand and their effects on price, and (2) that the precursors of the Marshallian curve already existed in Marx’s time and, indeed, he was familiar with one such author who made these sorts of diagrams, Karl Heinrich Rau,[10] who Engels attests Marx was not fond of.[11]

Proto-marginalists were also the source of some of Marx’s most vicious asides in Capital, as is apparent to anyone who has read Marx’s footnotes.[12] Just as well, Marx has other equivalent statements on supply and demand that don’t use the vocabulary of “forces” that Beggs makes so much hay of, and he also uses the language of equilibrium and “natural prices” to indicate a deeper regulator of market prices beyond temporary changes in supply and demand, an equivalent shift from the short term to the longer term in Marshallian language. It’s also well known that the long term classical supply and demand analysis assumed constant returns to scale, whereas the marginalists and Marshall assumed declining returns to scale, and between the two I find the classical assumptions to be more realistic when you freely allow for fixed capital investment.

And the discussion of the final essay:

For all of Burgis and Cohen's emphasis on the forces of production, they never discuss the actual dynamics which determine these forces or give them a scientific treatment. Neither is there any updating of Marx's theory through more recent innovations in social science, such as the Kalecki profit equations which formalized the relationship between profits and investment. I bring this up not as some trivia they should have been aware of, but to suggest how the Jacobin writers might have anticipated some of the rather obvious points in the final essay which they nonetheless appear ignorant of.

This essay, written by Ernesto Vargas, with contributions by Conrad Hamilton, dives into the economic and political history of Mexico in the twentieth century as a case study. The story is somewhat familiar to me. I can place where an uncle was kidnapped and tortured by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for being a communist in the 1970s, and other members of extended family belong to the “burgeoning middle class” that Ernesto mentions towards the end of this history, those who have benefited from the rapid economic development around the Monterrey-San Antonio logistical corridor. Still, even in Monterrey, which has transformed quite dramatically the past fifty years, it's quite obvious Mexico remains a ‘developing country,’ having more in common with places like Manila in its infrastructure and concentration of abject poverty than its counterparts north of the border.

The economic story here is the rise and fall of Mexican state-directed capitalism and the import-substitution schemes that accompanied it, a story which is all too familiar in the developing world of the twentieth century, but which, in many ways, has its origins and most concise archetype in one United States of Mexico. Wanting to break the hold of foreign capital on the Mexican economy, while at the same time developing the nation’s productive forces, successive governments pursued policies of domestic investment funded by government deficits while limiting exports.

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The Jacobin ideology rests, more or less, on the assumption that we, in developed countries, are above this same vulgar logic of the development of the productive forces. There is little recognition that our material conditions are closer to Britain in the early 1900s, what Lenin ridiculed as the deindustrializing playground of US millionaires, than any situation of continental Europe past or present. We, those of us in the US, have allowed investment rates to decline significantly and our productive forces to atrophy in order to cater to capitalist consumption, while resting on our currency’s role in the global circulation of capital to extract surplus, a role that itself, more or less, rests on our relatively degrading military superpower status. For the Jacobin authors, the productive forces essentially enter into the equation only as the most abstracted formulations of Marx, as a gestalt portrait of history, rather than any fact of economic reality that can be determined by quantifiable economic activity. Hence why, in the rate of profit debates, they must foreswear any possible contradiction between the development of the productive forces and Social-Democratic politics. In this way, Vargas is the only author in this collection that I believe that comes close to affirming Marxism as a science, by example if not as a theoretical justification.

For the generation that encountered socialism first in the mid 2010s, the Jacobin crowd, despite any complaints we had, represented the adults in the room. They represented a level of competency in both organizing and theoretical rigor which seemed a step above other factions on the Left. That, however, no longer feels true, even if it's only a result of the younger generations slowly accumulating their own theoretical knowledge. This is the other key aspect of maintaining Marxism as a science, which is the dual responsibility that a science places on the individual: to educate oneself, and to challenge the existing orthodoxies, to test in practice that famous standard of refutability. This responsibility demands that we not relax our epistemic standards even for a moment, that we check the footnotes, do background research on our own claims, and refuse to accept any claim we read at face value, even if we happen to agree with it. I would hope people such as the author of Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left would agree with this notion of rigor.