Comment by Ron Guignard
Lisa Macdonald in "The politics of postmodernism" (GLW April 20) claims that Marxism has it all over other philosophies. This is, she says, because it is scientific. For more than half a century I have seen claims like this in left journals and books. Even when I was a callow youth, I was uneasy about this. More recently I have taken a hard look at the many things that are wrong with the idea.
It might seem reasonable to look at what scientists mean when they speak of science. But even they don't all mean the same thing. So, let's first look at a rigorous definition of pure science. There is a list of points in Box 1. If you leave out one item of the list, you are not speaking of pure science. Already, we have a problem. Pure science has from time to time arrived at a height where for decades or even centuries it invariably predicted future states correctly. Then, a single case or type of case was found where the prediction was wrong.
An example was the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. It was a tiny bit out from what Newton's laws predicted. Einstein worked out some new laws using maths that weren't available in Newton's day. He got the right prediction on that and a few other things not before observed. But until he built the new paradigm, pure science did not match its own definition. The new paradigm then led to a further period when all predictions came true.
Except in rare and brief periods when a paradigm shift is needed, science seems to be perfect. In Marx's day, pure science had reached one of its periodic high points. Soon after his time, one scientist was bemoaning the end of science because, he said, we need only clean up a few decimal points here and there and science will be complete. The biggest scientific revolution to date came 10 years later.
So, Marx worked and wrote at a time when most people thought pure science was the perfect instrument it has never been. If he had been working and writing in the 1920s, when the whole of physics was seething with great paradigm shifts, he might not have thought it worthwhile to lay claim to being scientific.
What I have written so far shows that claims to scientific socialism are misleading if, by those claims, we mean that we have developed a perfect system that at least in theory can always predict accurately the outcome of events. Even scientists often forget that this is true of all science, even using the strongest meaning of the word. This does not have to matter. For instance, though Einstein's work is more correct than Newton's, the latter's is good enough to be used for such space navigation as we presently have. So, even if we're using a theory that's not as advanced as it might become, it may still be good enough for what we need.
So, let's use a slightly weaker definition of science. We need only change the last item in box 1 — Let's say that our major predictions must mostly be accurate enough for practical purposes. Box 2 shows five major predictions Marx made 146 years ago, and the events that really happened.
Marx claimed that these substantive predictions were scientific. He intended this to be understood as meaning that they would inevitably come true. The left has since spent much effort on using 20/20 hindsight to explain away these discrepancies. This is not science in even the weakest sense.
This is not to say that Marx never got any forecast right. He correctly predicted that capitalism would always have periodic crises of overproduction and under-consumption. He predicted also that this would lead to greater concentration of power over resources in the hands of fewer companies. Many of his other predictions have come true.
We can liken Marx's science and later developments of it to the prediction of weather. But even with our latest advances in both mathematics and equipment, the earth/atmosphere/sun heat engine still surprises us too often. And heat engines have been studied for more than two centuries.
This brings us to think about the second item in box 1, mathematics. If a system is simple, we can usually use simple maths to model it. If it is complex, the maths usually gets more complex too. Thus, Newton could develop his theories of motion and of gravity only after first inventing the calculus. He could not develop the theory of relativity because nobody had yet worked up a non-Euclidean geometry, nor a few other necessary maths ideas.
But what do we mean by a system being simple? I could tell you of a system with three simple rules and a known initial state. You apply the rules to determine the next state, then apply the same ones again to this new state to determine the state after that and so on. Intuitively, you would think this is a very predictable system. Yet nobody has yet worked out a maths that will in all cases predict the state 2 stages ahead of the current one.
Think then about the complexity of human society and what maths theories might be needed to make accurate predictions about it. The system is the nexus of physiology, anatomy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, politics, economics etc in a setting which is the nexus of geology, geography, atmosphere, ecology etc. It may well be that we don't yet have the maths to cope with this scientifically, even using a weaker sense of the word.
We may of course hope that the maths can be developed some time. Even there, we find problems. Like science, maths progresses. About a century ago, Hilbert was recognised as the top mathematician. He posed six problems to his fellows in the field. One of these was to develop a maths which was provably complete and self-consistent.
Russell and Whitehead took him up on it and wrote Principia Mathematica. Unfortunately for them, a mathematician called Goedel showed that there could never be a provably complete and self-consistent maths. This was not merely a theory. In fact, it is known as Goedel's proof.
Roughly what Goedel proved was that in any consistent maths system it is always possible to make a valid statement that can not be proved to be either true or false by using that system. The proof of truth or falsehood needed a higher level system which included the original one as a subset. But this one, too, would yield statements that could not be proved true or false within it. So, however far you go, there can be no ultimate mathematical system.
This leaves us with a possibility that there may never be a maths to give us invariably accurate predictions of the behaviour of human society. One thing's sure. We clearly have not got one yet.
Our claims to have such a science are at least very premature. They may have been the cause of the many failures of the left in the past. We have always foisted these claims on people as a means to gain the leadership of popular movements. This has in the end left some of them bewildered when our predictions failed. Others, who had more knowledge of science than we, would have been left bemused or derisory by our claims. Think about it!