Marxist Scientific View of History

[Fifty]

Hello history forum.


I heard a blurb the other day somewhere about something called Marx's Scientific View of History. It didn't mention what the view was, but it did say that some say it is BS because it is "unfalsifiable", falsifiability being one of the necessary aspects of a science.

A cursory glance at wikipedia yielded nothing of interest, so I ask ya'll:


what (in short) is Marx's scientific view of history?

Is it really scientific? Falsifiable?

 

[Plotinus]

I don't know about Marx's theory of history, but the question of falsifiability is a general and controversial one.

In my opinion, it's true that a theory needs to be falsifiable in order to count as scientific. Because science works with evidence: so if in principle no kind of evidence could count against a claim, it cannot be scientifically tested.

However, I don't think that a theory has to be falsifiable in order to be true. It is sometimes said that theism is not falsifiable: anything that happens or could happen is, perhaps, compatible with God's existence. At any rate, those who believe in God typically maintain this belief even after considering the suffering in the world and so on. So perhaps theism is unfalsifiable - but it does not follow that it is not true. It could still be true even given all this.

 

[Verbose]

Well, if Laceafarul doesn't turn up and lay down the Marxist law on this, I might take a stab at it.

Just generally the claim is that Marxist dialectic materialism has in fact struck upon the true nuts and bolts of society and how they manifest themselves at different times in history.

Who controls the material means of production at any given time gives rise to everything else. All ideology, intellectual history, religion etc. is just "superstructure" in the cruder forms classic Marxist historical narratives (but one can introduce theoretical concepts like "hegemony" into it and suddenly it comes alive again).

Given this history can be described in a stairlike fashion, a progression through a number of set stages: depostism — feudalism — capitalism — proletarian dictature — true communism. (That is, iirc this.) It's assumed to be an objective process that can't in fact be subverted or avoided. This is where history will by necessity lead, so there's a considerable amount if teleology involved.

And that's where the claims to be both scientific and unflasifiable have occured.
Though these days I've found few Marxist historians espounsing anything as crude as the outline I've just drawn, which is more in line with what Marxist political hardliners might have learned from group-studies in the 1970's.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

Hello history forum.


I heard a blurb the other day somewhere about something called Marx's Scientific View of History. It didn't mention what the view was, but it did say that some say it is BS because it is "unfalsifiable", falsifiability being one of the necessary aspects of a science.

A cursory glance at wikipedia yielded nothing of interest, so I ask ya'll:


what (in short) is Marx's scientific view of history?

Is it really scientific? Falsifiable?

Marx believed that history was a succession of economic models, each one more efficient than the former. His view was that feudalism had been replaced by capitalism, which would eventually be replaced with communism ("dictatorship of the proletariat"). He believed that each economic system would grow until it became self-defeating, ultimately replaced with a more efficient model.

Marx's theory failed in its prediction that capitalism would collapse of its own weight and that the "workers" would overthrow it. In the last 150 years, communism has demonstrated that it could only arise in states where there was anarchy, and only in a limited number. Communism has also since been in decline, and has been demonstrated to be LESS efficient than capitalism. Furthermore, Marx's theory of history isn't even accurate. Feudalism actually represented a brief devolution of civilization, and what's more, only in Europe. Capitalism had been in existence prior to feudalism, in antiquity, such as during the Roman Empire, which featured many economic institutions that we have today, including moneylending, checks, and even incorporation. In China, feudalism had been largely destroyed 2000 years ago, and in many ways, the Chinese bureaucracy was a centrally planned economy.

Marx's history is scientific, in that it uses rational argument and presentation of historical data to prove its point. And it is, in fact, falsifiable, because of the reasons given.

 

[luiz]

What the OP is mentioning is Popper's critique of Marxism. Basically Marx believed that history was a succession that would follow a predictable path and "culminate" at a point which he could predict. Popper argued that this was based merely on Marx's observations and extrapolations, there was no scientific backing to it and in fact it could never be scientific since it is not a falsifiable theory.

 

[willemvanoranje]

Well, that's just he behaviouralist vision on all of this. Obviously their epistemologic views clash with Marx' theory; it is impossible to reproduce history to check if Marx' ideas about history are right... and I might be incorrect, but I don't think his theories were detailed enough to give some (empirical) predictions on the future.. you'd have to fill in a lot yourself.

 

[Plotinus]

I don't see how a theory which makes predictions is unfalsifiable.

 

[luiz]

I don't see how a theory which makes predictions is unfalsifiable.

If you don't define a time frame your prediction can't be falsified no matter how absurd.

 

[willemvanoranje]

That's what I meant.

 

[Plotinus]

Ah, very clever.

Nevertheless, there are degrees of falsifiability. The theory of evolution by natural selection is predictive (it predicts that species will tend to adapt to their environments) but it's not hard and fast and certainly doesn't give a timeframe. The existence of species which have apparently remained unchanged for millions of years even though their environments have changed, or species which seem not very well adapted to their environments, is not considered very damaging evidence against the theory. But we still call the theory scientific, because it's falsifiable in another way: it relies upon historical evidence. And if someone digs up, say, a 100-million-year-old gorilla fossil, that would be evidence against the theory, or at least against considerable portions of the theory. And if sufficient evidence of that kind turned up, then the theory would have to be revised considerably. So here we have a theory which is considered scientific, which isn't much cop at predicting except at the most general level, but which is still falsifiable in some sense.

I suppose you could say that the theory of evolution by natural selection is predictive in another sense: it predicts that you're not going to dig up 100-million-year-old gorilla fossils. But then, we could say the same of Marx's theory of history, since his theory is not just about what will happen in the future but about what happened in the past too. So its plausibility depends on whether or not feudalism did always precede capitalism. And you could say that the theory makes predictions such as "However much you study history, you will never find a society that developed capitalism before feudalism." And predictions like that are clearly falsifiable (and quite probably actually false, too.

That's how I see it anyway. This sort of thing is all terribly tendentious for many reasons.

 

[willemvanoranje]

Well, this criteria of falsifiability comes from the behaviouralists I think. It's them that refuse to name anything 'scientific' if it isn't falsifiable. This doesn't mean all streams within science agree...