The Multidisciplinarian

Marxists are ignorant. In a very literal sense. They are capable of willfully ignoring the universe of evidence showing the fundamentals of Marxian thought to have been disproved before Marx’s ink dried. Maybe some of them are just childish or stupid. They can be excused. But most Marxists are intelligent adults who have made a bad faith decision to pretend that their theory is not disproved by every semiconductor in their cars and mobile phones, and every LED light bulb in existence. Every Marxist book denouncing private property is copyrighted. They want us to free ourselves of the restraints that made freedom possible.

Marx was a spoiled lout who never worked an honest day in his life, rarely repaid his unending loans, disparaged his creditors, blamed his infant son’s death on capitalism while he remained drunk and lived in squalor, abused his maid – whom he never paid a cent – and described Ferdinand Lassalle as “the Jewish Nigger Lassalle.” In his essay “On the Jewish Question,” Marx wrote that “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Jewishness.”  There’s lots more where those come from.

Marx wanted “… not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.” His writings for the Central Committee of the Communist League was devoured and put into practice by Lenin, resulting in genocide. His thought fueled totalitarian despots like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and the attempts to implement his poorly expressed ideas caused mass starvation, cultural stagnation, and tens of millions of deaths. Yet he probably has more influence on academic thought than Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. Pillars of the academic left are quick to point out that Marx would be horrified to find his words being used to defend the use of state power against individuals. Yet those words were quoted liberally by Lenin in defense of autocratic power and murder. Those self-important academic indoctrinators somehow imagine that there could be a different interpretation of Marx by the average power-hungry psychopath.

Marx was a miserable person, in every sense. His Doctrine of Misery is endlessly analyzed by intellectuals, though they cannot agree on what it is exactly. All boats simply cannot rise under Marxism. It’s a zero sum game. Where Marx occasionally leans toward admitting that all boats could in theory rise, his complaint reduces to envy. Better for all to starve than for some to have burgers while others eat fillet mignon.

“Thus although the enjoyments of the workers have risen, the social satisfaction that they give has fallen in comparison with the increased enjoyments of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker.”

Marx’s poetry sheds light on his self-image. In one he penned, “with disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the face of the world.” That poem goes on to add (translated):

Then will I wander god-like and victorious
through the ruins of the world.
and, giving my words an active force,
I will feel equal to the Creator.”

Marx was irresponsible, egotistical, and a thoroughly despicable human. But none of that makes Marx a bad scientist, or Marxism a bad science.

So let me start over.

Marx was not the first to embrace the Labor Theory of Value. David Ricardo and Adam Smith preceded him there. Marx was more certain than Smith that value was solely determined by the amount of manual labor it took to produce a thing plus the cost of the raw materials that went into it. Given his obscurant writing style, Marx was surprisingly clear in describing his own theory of value:

“The determination of price by the cost of production is equivalent to the determination of price by the labor time necessary for the manufacture of a commodity, for the cost of production consists of 1) raw materials and depreciation of instruments, that is, of industrial products the production of which has cost a certain amount of labor days and which, therefore, represent a certain amount of labor time, and 2) direct labor, the measure of which is, precisely, time.” – Wage Labor and Capital, 1847.

Marx undoubtedly had access to the first wave of the Austrian school of economics, but he ignored it rather than disputing it – rather like his present academic progenitors. Marx didn’t invite criticism or disputation and rarely responded to his critics. Instead he continued for decades to spew more from the same fountain, muddying the water to make it look deep. When Engels suggested to Marx that his theory of value might be misunderstood by those not accustomed to abstract thought, Marx replied, in his usual style rather than with the relative clarity of the above definition:

“. . . the conversion of surplus value into profit … presupposes a previous account of the process of circulation of capital, since the turnover of capital, etc., plays a part here. Hence this matter can be set forth only in the third book…. Here it will be shown whence the way of thinking of the philistine and the vulgar economist derives, namely, from the fact that only the immediate form in which relationships appear is always reflected in their brain, and not their inner connections. If the latter were the case, moreover, what would be the need for a science at all? If I were to silence all such objections in advance, I should ruin the whole dialectical method of development. On the contrary, this method has the advantage of continually setting traps for these fellows which provoke them to untimely demonstrations of their asininity.”

I enjoy the above quote, because in it he obfuscates his own defense of obfuscation. Some might be wondering what this idiot could really mean. The modern Marxist invariably responds that if you don’t agree with Marx, you’re not intelligent enough to understand him. Marx was no idiot. He was a skilled rhetorician who had terrible values and was profoundly dishonest. He wrote gibberish for the same reason that social scientists write it – to sound intelligent in the midst of others doing the same thing and to dupe impressionable youth. He wrote this intellectual twaddle on purpose.

Intellectuals, particularly academic ones, as Friedrich Hayek often noted, tend to overvalue intellectualism. But pseudo-intellectuals overvalue pseudo-intellectuals even more, and they have come to occupy of our academic institutions.

A favorite passage of mine comes from the Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels in 1848:

“It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labor when there is no longer any capital.”

Charitably read, Marx means rich folk don’t know what work is. He seems to have no clue that some of the bourgeois’ wealth stems from putting capital at risk to predict future demand, which may involve some sort of work, sweat and misery. In fact, Marx does have such a clue, but he doesn’t want his reader to. Go back to writing poetry, you sot. It was bad, but at least it was honest.

Why should I bother analyzing Marxism as a science if no one today thinks Marxism to be a science? Ah, but they do. They just don’t write it down. It remains implicit.

Astrology and Creation Science do microscopically small harm compared to the science of Marxism. Academics routinely describe our era as “Late Capitalism,” seemingly a blind-faith acceptance of Marx’s assertion that capitalism would give rise to socialism and then communism. Thus late capitalism seems for them to be not merely an empirical fact but something axiomatic like a law of nature. Everything that comes out of university “theory” disciplines reeks of Marx’s obscurant form of expression.

Marxist-isms include modes of production, relations of production, wage-labor, social production, equivalent form, cultural hegemony, social consciousness, base and superstructure, discourse, commodity fetish, social division of labor, political economy, relative deprivation, and my favorite, theory and practice. That last phrase is so ubiquitous that, even in disciplines that feign being objective, it is shamelessly vomited out as if it would be vulgar to ask if any evidence validating said theory was ever collected prior to its being put into practice.

Nothing is really wrong with many of Marxism’s terms. Cultural hegemony can, if applied well, point to something observable in the real world. But academics across the social sciences, unfortunately often including economics, pack Marxian phraseology so tightly that not even vague meaning can be extracted.

If you’re not familiar with Marx, consider a few lines from the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy before I move on to the havoc he has wreaked or wrought upon academia:

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.

Obscurantism: muddying the water to make it look deep. He sneers at the reader, like his social-science descendants. The wording limits further inquiry to shield the writer from having the vacuousness of his content exposed. As Schopenhauer wrote of Hegel in On the Basis of Morality, “a colossal piece of mystification … by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage” [emphasis added]. While Marx criticized Hegel’s philosophy, he loved his dialectical method and obscurant manner of expression. Such expression may work for abstract philosophical concepts but does not work in the realm of evidence, empiricism, theory selection, and theory confirmation.

Skip forward 150 years and consider the writings of modern academic Marxists, some who claim that title, others not. Judith Butler is the poster child for writing bullshit, but her stench is only slightly worse than most. Here’s her celebrated classic from the journal Diacritics in 1997:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

It’s not impossible to decipher this, but I think my above criticism stands. There is much less there than meets the eye. Butler replied to her critics that demands for intelligibility are aggressions intended to force her into conformity and that her shockingly radical thought simply cannot be contained by ordinary language. Mind you, Butler is not a Marxist. She just writes like one. The journal International Socialism draws a line: “Judith Butler is not a Marxist, but many of her concerns are ours too.” See also: Judith Butler’s Scientific Revolution: Foundations for a Transsexual Marxism.

Radical thought, Butler teaches, simply can’t be expressed clearly. So, when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, their only recourse shall be to rearticulate their ideological apparatus to reject structural totalities as theoretical objects with consequent commutation to those in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony, not conceived in liberty, but bound up with the contingent strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Karl Marx, this bullshit is all on you. Your fault. I hope your hell is to listen to Judith Butler on endless replay. Better yet, Judith Butler doing an impersonation of Hegel. But then you’d probably like that. So instead, may you listen to Hemingway tape loops. Hemingway leaned Marxist. Yes. I know that. He didn’t write Marxist. He wrote well. It’s simple. Everyone knows it. I like Hemingway. The sun also rises. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

I’m going to need to start again…

Marxism: Claims to Scientific Status

Karl Marx was keenly interested in science. He claimed scientific objectivity for his theory. In Capital, for example, Marx compares himself to physicists and biologists, repeatedly characterizing his method as scientific in the same sense as those disciplines. Today’s Marxism also holds that it is a science. Marxists.org teaches that “Marxism is understood as scientific in the sense that it has understood correctly the laws of motion of a historical process taking place independently of men’s will.” It adds that all that is left for Marxists to do “is to fill in the details, to apply the scientific understanding of history.” Marxist.com (are they the for-profit alternative to Marxists.org?) teaches that “Marxism is distinguished by utilising all the developments of scientific method and historical analysis.”

My critique of modern Marxist science deals with Marxism, not Marx. Marxism relates to Marx in the way that Kuhnianism relates to Kunn: “I am not a Kuhnian,” Kuhn wrote.

“I am not a Marxist,” Marx wrote in an 1883 letter to the French Marxists, Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde. Yet it seems impossible to leave Karl Marx out of discussion of the scientific status of Marxism or Marxian thought, because today’s Marxism still speaks in the language of Marx and Hegel. See above.

I won’t argue that Hegel has no value. But Hegel has no scientific value. Marx and Marxists put their science in the language of Hegel. See the problem?

“Reason… is Substance, as well as Infinite Power; its own Infinite Material underlying all the natural and spiritual life which it originates, as also the Infinite Form, – that which sets this Material in motion” – Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History.

Marx’s non-standard conception of evidence and scientific method is revealed in his writing:

“Scientific truth is always a paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.” – Value, Price, and Profit, 1865

“All science would be superfluous, if the appearance, the form, and the nature of things were wholly identical.” – Capital, 1909

[Samuel Bailey] confuses the form of capital with capital itself – Capital, 1909

While Marx claimed to be following Darwin in his approach, quotes like the above make Marx seem to operate in the Platonic realm, not the scientific. Like Plato, Rousseau, and Descartes, Marx is entrenched in Theory, the sort of theory that no amount of evidence can refute, the world of Judith Butler. 

Criteria of Scientificness

From the perspective of history and philosophy of science, in asking whether Marxism is good science, we need to look at its goals, claims, methods, research agenda, and explanatory ambitions. Marxism makes bold epistemic claims and gushes with explanatory aspirations. Its predictive success is an entirely different matter, and one that grabbed young Karl Popper’s attention.

Popper is the philosopher science, mentioned in the last few posts, most celebrated by modern scientists. He treated scientists as almost heroic. He thought that they court refutation by making falsifiable claims and predictions while continually putting their theories on trial. Lakatos and Popper used the term rational reconstruction to describe a hypothetical, abbreviated route between formulation of a theory and its justification. I.e., what matters to science is not the actual historical route with all the wrong turns and dead ends, but a route that could logically have been taken. As such, rational reconstruction lets us verify or vindicate theories after the fact.

Kuhn strongly disagreed with Popper that scientists put their theories on trial. Kuhn also saw it as a problem that science is taught as if the process of theory discovery and development was actually its rational reconstruction.

As a boy Popper had worked for the Communist Party and toyed with Marxism. Quickly disillusioned, he later compared the claims of Marx and Freud with those of Einstein. Popper concluded that Einstein made bold, falsifiable predictions while Marx and Freud made mostly vague predictions. Further, Einstein’s theories predicted things that defied common sense. The claims of Einstein’s theories, though unprovable for all cases, could be tested and found false in some cases, and therefore the theories could be disproven. If the rays from a distant star did not bend around the sun – a very nonintuitive effect – Einstein’s theory of gravity would be proven wrong. Was there an analog in the theories of Marx and Freud?

Marxism and Freudian psychology were held by the Vienna Circle, where Popper came of age, to be the scientific descendants of Darwinism. Popper thought Freud explained too many results – aggressive personality, shy personality, or comedian, for example – with the same cause, an abusive mother, for example. Popper thought that evidence that confirmed a theory was too easy to come by, but offered that “The criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability” (Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934).

He thought the Marxists made some falsifiable predictions, like that a revolution would occur in an industrialized country. But, Popper thought, those predictions were in fact falsified. Marxist predictions failed time after time. Thomas Sowell reports 40 failed predictions (yet see, e.g., “Capitalism is Unfolding Exactly as Karl Marx Predicted”). Revolutions occurred in peasant lands and not in industrial ones. Yet, in Popper’s view, on each such occasion, a post hoc revision was made by the Marxists to save their theory. The Marxists offered that if they had remembered to take into account the charisma of Lenin, then of course they would have predicted a revolution in Russia. Popper thought the Marxists continually modified their theories in the face of counterevidence, every time they were found to make wrong predictions. The result was that Marxist theories were also immune to possible falsification. For Popper, Marxism was pseudoscience.

Responses to Popper

Maurice Cornforth’s 1968 Reply to Dr. Karl Popper’s Refutations of Marxism consumes 381 pages and is similar to other Marxist responses. It contains the word evidence 14 times, theory 338 times, and revolution 170 times. In my view, a look at the points on which Conforth and Popper agree and disagree confirms Popper’s conclusions. In the passage below, Conforth agrees that science proceeds by making falsifiable theories but then adds that every scientific theory consists of more than that by resting on its fundamental theory and “is guided by it in its inquiries.”

The scrutiny of Marx’s fundamental ideas about society reveals, then, their scientific character. Dr. Popper’s failure to grasp this fact illustrates his failure, in his published work on scientific method, to grasp more than one single aspect of scientific procedures. He says that science proceeds by making “conjectures” which are “falsifiable”, and then devising all manner of ways of trying to falsify them. So far as it goes, that is true enough. But yet the body of scientific theory consists of more than just a collection of falsifiable conjectures which are variously revised or replaced by other conjectures as falsification actually overtakes them. Every well-developed science rests on its fundamental theory, and is guided by it in its inquiries. This is a feature of science which Dr. Popper never examines — possibly because he distrusts such expressions as “fundamental theory”, which he thinks redolent of pseudo-scientific metaphysics. (Cornforth, 1968)

On Conforth’s last point (resting on its fundamental theory and guided by it in its inquiries) I have two observations. First, a scientific theory does not rest on any particular fundamental theory. Newton’s theory of gravitation is a wrong but good scientific theory, by any standards. The fact that we can judge it wrong in light of the success of Einstein’s theory of gravitation, which is incompatible with Newton’s, does not lessen Newton’s status as a good theory. Its predictive success and explanatory power are incomparable. Newton’s theory of gravitation does not rest on its fundamental theory. It rests on generalizations inferred from evidence, i.e. laws of nature, but it is not self-justifying, which is the most charitable reading of “rest on its fundamental theory” that I can come up with.

Second, what might “guided by it [i.e., its fundamental theory] in its inquiries” mean in a scientific sense? I’m trying to interpret this charitably but am at a loss. It reads like what we see elsewhere in Marx’s and Marxian thought. Popper found “fundamental theory” to be pseudo-scientific metaphysics. Popper reached that conclusion because he couldn’t map those words onto any element or concept in his conception of scientific theories or in a theory of scientific explanations. I can’t, can you?

Private Language

Marxists’ only recourse to this challenge is one that we see often in Marxist responses to its critics: “you just don’t understand.” But it is the duty of Marxists to make sure they’re understood by those they wish to persuade or educate. Otherwise, their literature must be understood as dogma to be accepted by those who take the leap of faith – to believe a priori – and hope that some deeper understanding will follow. That makes Marxism a religion.

Even if such wording maps to specific concepts and the mapping is agreed upon by each Marxist, it exists as private language, and all of Wittgenstein’s concerns apply. Most centrally, if Marxism is in principle incapable of translation into ordinary language, then it can refer only to inner experiences shared by Marxists in isolation from non-Marxists. Again, this is the realm of religion, and Popper’s dogmatism critique still applies, by virtue of both belief system and language. I can find nothing that approaches a rational reconstruction of Marx’s theory or Marxist theory without the Hegelian windiness and circularity. Doctrinal disputes have always plagued Marxism, as reported even by Lenin and Stalin.

In response to Popper’s claim that Marxists continually invent supplemental hypotheses to modify their theory in light of failed predictions, Conforth, as does marxists.org, simply denies that Marxists do this: “the Marxist procedure has never been to invent supplementary hypotheses.”

Conforth admits outright that the theory is broad (vague) enough to accommodate a predicted revolution in England that never happened and an unpredicted in Russia that did happen. If Marxism’s “fundamental theory” is simply that all historical events are explained by class struggle, then the theory is purely explanatory and contains no predictive potential. And therefore, it is not scientific. Conforth argues for the predictive success of Marxism:

We simply examine what has actually happened, which has by no means exceeded the bounds of possibility allowed by the general theory of Marxism, and find that it has led to consequences predictable and accountable within the theory. And similarly with the Russian Revolution. (Cornforth, 1968) 

Conforth, unsurprisingly, points out that all scientific theories undergo continual revision. Copernican heliocentrism bears little resemblance to Keplerian heliocentrism. Copernicus’s orbits were circular and still employed Ptolemaic epicycles. Indeed, but heliocentrism always made bold predictions, and when Einstein’s theory of gravitation disagreed with Newton’s revisions of Kepler and Copernicus, Newton’s theory was declared fundamentally wrong but still useful enough to predict the trajectories of spacecraft. Scientists who understand science do not say either that Newtonian mechanics is “true” or that Einstein’s theory is true. Contemporary Marxists may say the same of Marxism. It doesn’t claim truth but merely claims utility. More on Marxism’s utility below in Theory and Practice.

Granting that Marxist theory is not falsified by failed predictions requires us to accept that the theory is vague. Not only does it make vague predictions about revolutions, but sincere attempts at interpreting the theory draw different conclusions about where it sits on individual cases. If science, this seems like bad science. Imre Lakatos mostly argued against the scientificness of Marxism on the grounds of failed predictions. But from another perspective central to Lakatos, Marxism’s research agenda is paper thin. Like that of Creation Science, Marxist research, e.g. Marxist Institute for Research, does not involve increasingly specific subdomains but pedagogy and interpretation of current events (evidence) in light of Marxist theory.

Marxist Explanations

A Marxist might argue that predictive success is less important than explanatory power. Botany, some would say, is a legitimate science but makes relatively few predictions and its value is in its ability to explain the relationships between different species (forms, for the Marxists, kinds, for the Creation Scientists), along with their genetics, physiology and chemical processes. As an example, we might use botany to know what plants can live side by side and how to maximize their yield. Marxism might similarly claim to explain history and economics thereby telling us how to optimize manufacturing, distribution, and the economy in general. But that is not the focus of contemporary Marxism.

What does Marxism explain? Some would say it explains the impact of the ruling class on laborers or that all value derives from labor. But Marxism’s claims that the ruling class abuses workers and that labor is the sole source of value are not what scientists mean by explanations. They are Marxism’s claims of empirical evidence evidence itself – the things we would want a scientific explanation to explain.

There is a constant tension in scientific explanation to avoid going too deep into why questions. Doing so can quickly descend into metaphysics, as noted by the logical positivists and by Popper. But most historians and philosophers of science agree that why questions are still a primary goal of science and scientific explanations. A scientific explanation within Marxism might look at the decline of tire manufacturing in Akron in combination with the inflation-adjusted income of rubber company executives. On Marxists sites and in Marxist literature, studies of that sort are scarce in comparison to big-picture ideological writings denouncing capitalism and calling for a classless society.

Scientific explanations appeal to laws of nature. They historically have resorted to appeals to causation only after, in explaining a phenomenon, exhaustion of attempts to show that deductive logic applied to laws of nature necessitate – confer nomic expectability upon – the phenomenon being explained. In that sense explanation and prediction are mostly symmetrical. You can’t explain what you can’t predict. Alternate version: an economist is someone who can always explain why his last prediction was wrong.

Marx and Marxism use the term “laws of motion” in what seems to be an appeal to the status held by Newtonian mechanics. Kepler’s laws and Newton’s three laws are stated explicitly and concisely. Marx never tells us what his laws of motion are. Nor do more recent Marxists. In Late Capitalism, Ernest Mandel has a chapter titled “The Laws of Motion and the History of Capital.” In it he tells us that Marx “discovered” these laws and that they relate to one of the most complex problems of Marxist theory. Mandel is critical of Marx, and much of the chapter deals with the difference between Marx’s and Althusser’s understandings of markets. But Mandel never states or describes the laws and never bases an explanation of phenomena on the laws. He instead tells us that the dialectic method can explain decisive general connections between empirical material’s constituent abstract elements and Marx’s laws of motion. Here, in my third start on the topic of Marxism, I tried giving honest effort to doing right by Marxism. But this kind of writing calls up another of Schopenhauer’s comments on Hegel: “pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking.”

Theory and Practice

The phrase Theory and Practice permeates Marxist writing. A charitable interpretation is something along the lines of: we don’t merely advocate this course of action, we put it into practice. But in what sense is that true. As Thomas Sowell points out, Marx’s contribution to economics can be readily summarized as zero: “Capital was a detour into a blind alley.” As for putting the Marxist utopia into practice, evidence suggests the practice doesn’t vindicate the theory. Marxists excel at comparing theoretical Marxism with as-deployed capitalism. Marxist theorists so undervalue evidence that they repeat a phrase attributed to Marx, “theory without practice is sterile,” as if it gives Marxism scientific status. Compare this to a phrase attributed to Immanuel Kant, “theory without evidence is mere intellectual play.” (The fact that both attributions may be spurious is irrelevant to the point.) Practice is not evidence, and, no, this is not merely a matter of translating German into English.

An example of Marx explicitly stating that theory can trump evidence is in an 1868 letter from Marx to Louis Kugelmann:

On the other hand, as you correctly assumed, the history of the theory certainly shows that the concept of the value relation has always been the same — more or less clear, hedged more or less with illusions or scientifically more or less definite. Since the thought process itself grows out of conditions, is itself a natural process, thinking that really comprehends must always be the same, and can vary only gradually, according to maturity of development, including the development of the organ by which the thinking is done. Everything else is drivel.

On Marx’s Labor Theory of Value, we now have the kind and volume of evidence about value that may not have been available to Karl Marx. We can grant Marx but not Marxists this concession. Today, integrated circuits clearly have value far above that of their raw materials and embodied labor. Integrated circuits, among countless other modern objects of consumption – software and data data, for  example – are strong evidence that Carl Menger’s definition of value applies and that Karl Marx’s does not.

Value is nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, nor an independent thing existing by itself. It is a judgment economizing men make about the importance of goods at their disposal for the maintenance of their lives and well-being. Hence value does not exist outside the consciousness of men. (Menger, Principles of Economics, 1873)

Independent of accuracy or utility on Austrian economic theory, Menger’s claim that value is the quantitative relationship between requirements for a product and the availability of it is concise, and it is consistent with evidence from retail and wholesale markets. Evidence from modern life suggests that markets are far better at allocating people to production tasks than are individual persons in any role, corporate, governmental or otherwise. When asked what mechanism might in a communist (i.e. Marxist – by 1860 Marx used communism and socialism interchangeably) system to determine production requirements, Marx said “there would however be some sort of plan which would in some unspecified way determine what is really needed” [emphasis added].

History also seems to confirm Menger’s claim that Marx is wrong in believing that the spinning of yarn in a factory is the product of the labor of the operatives. Does Marx believe that systems of factory production are self-organizing?

Self-Organization in Markets

The concept of self-organization seems to me another primary defect of Marxian and Marxist belief. On this topic internal inconsistencies abound. Marx apparently believes that self-organization is possible in industry but impossible in markets. I.e., they deny that markets are emergent entities possessing knowledge about demand that no person holds individually. Likewise, today’s Marxists are perfectly comfortable with the concepts of self-organization, local reduction in entropy, and strong emergence – systems that possess emergent qualities not reduceable to the system’s constituents. Examples include belief in a naturally fined tuned universe, the natural formation of galaxies, and human evolution.

Yet today’s Marxists overwhelmingly reject that markets can know things that a specialist or bureaucrat cannot. Hayek expressed it well: “It is because every individual knows so little and because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive effort of many.” This, ironically, shows the capitalist to embrace a sort of collectivism that the modern Marxist, not Marx, rejects. Marxism applies the word collective to all sorts of things, but never to knowledge, perhaps because if they did they might be forced to allow that markets embody collective knowledge – a design without a designer, a design that extracts information from the world that no team of technocrats could acquire.

“Markets don’t solve everything” is a common retort (Robert Reich, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). No one claims they do. 

Conclusion

If Marxism is a science, either as Marx laid it out or as contemporary Marxists interpret it, it is a bad science. It either makes predictions that fail verification, and thus the theory is falsified, or it makes predictions so vague as to not be falsifiable. To the extent that it can be understood, it is internally inconsistent. A lack of precise language makes it difficult to understand, as is confirmed by historical factions and fragmentation of contemporary interpretations. Unlike Creation Science, Marxism generally lacks the trappings of science; it doesn’t publish scientific papers and its research agenda is thin. Its theory of value is inconsistent with pricing and price fluctuation of modern goods. Its arguments and explanations do not meet standard scientific criteria. For me, Marxism’s inconsistency on the tenability of self-organization and emergence shows a level of dogmatism sufficient to classify it as religion. An ugly religion at that. A radical aspect of the emergence after Galileo was the realization that while theories can be underdetermined by evidence, contrary evidence always trumps theory. Evidence is never disproved by theory. Modern Marxists fail to grasp this. Marxism does not merit the epistemic status that society affords to science but that academia grants to Marxism.

***

The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope. – Karl Marx

The offspring of privilege have dominated the leadership of Marxist movements from the days of Marx and Engels through Lenin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh – Thomas Sowell

The Left should put a moratorium on theory. – Richard Rorty

Jordan Peterson’s thought is filled with pseudo-science, bad pop psychology, and deep irrationalism. In other words, he’s full of shit. – Jacobin.com

Prayer may not be very efficient when compared to celestial mechanics, but it surely holds its own vis-a-vis some parts of economics. – Paul Feyerabend

True tragedy occurs when the idea of justice leads to the destruction of higher values – Richard Rorty

The Communist Manifesto, written by two bright and articulate young men without responsibility even for their own livelihoods—much less for the social consequences of their vision—has had a special appeal for successive generations of the same kinds of people. – Thomas Sowell

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I have become a man, I put away childish things. 1 Cor 13:11

We require that our theories harmonize in detail with the very wide range of phenomena they seek to explain. We insist that they provide us with useful guidance rather than with rationalizations. – John R. Piece, An Introduction to Information Theory

It may be said of Socialism, therefore, that its friends recommended it as increasing equality, while its foes resisted it as decreasing liberty….The compromise eventually made was one of the most interesting and even curious cases in history. It was decided to do everything that had ever been denounced in Socialism, and nothing that had ever been desired in it…we proceeded to prove that it was possible to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality….In short, people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad. – G.K. Chesterton

Value is nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, nor an independent thing existing by itself. It is a judgment economizing men make about the importance of goods at their disposal for the maintenance of their lives and well-being. Hence value does not exist outside the consciousness of men.  – Carl Menger