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.

This is somewhat frustrating, as all the major authors they cite on this question, whether it be Marx himself, Althusser, or G.A. Cohen (at least in his early period) would have argued forcefully that there is a project called “scientific socialism”; a project that, although there probably would have been considerable disagreement among the above-mentioned figures regarding its content, depends on an actual scientific project, particularly in the form of historical materialism. How exactly did this happen, that in the past fifty years or so this claim became so indefensible? I don’t have a precise answer, though I suspect it has something to do with the actual tradition of Marxist scientific practice being broken. Regardless of its exact cause, this omission in the essays within Flowers for Marx is quite glaring and only possible through key misreadings and inaccuracies.

Althusser as a Philosopher of What?

After a fascinating introduction by Daniel Tutt on the role that opposition to censorship played in the thought of the early Marx, McManus and Hamilton debate the role of science and normativity in Marxism. Both McManus and Hamilton rely extensively on Althusser in their exchange, McManus uses him as a foil to attempt to show why a “normative vocabulary” is so important for Marxism, whereas Hamilton shows how painting Althusser as against normativity simply because he was against Marxist humanism for strategic reasons is something of a strawman. However, it’s worth considering McManus’s claims as they are, as it’s a common enough argument. He states:

Why should we care that the historical destiny of humankind is to become freer and more materially well off, rather than simply being wiped out like most of the other species in this planet’s far longer history? Why be a partisan for humankind? This is why the descriptive vocabulary of Marxism must be tied to one which is normative as well.

If one thinks for a moment, this actually doesn’t follow at all. Why does the question of whether “we should care about mankind” have anything to do with what Marxism says, let alone, what its vocabulary is? It is easy enough to establish that normativity matters, or indeed that it matters to a political project, but what, precisely, is the connection to the content of Marxism? People come to Marxist politics with all sorts of diverse motivations; should the point simply be to iron out these differences so that they all care about the exact same things; have the exact same normative project? Certainly, sometimes it feels like that’s the point of radical politics when it veers into all the ills Daniel Tutt describes in his introduction, a culture of censorship which has pervaded radical publishing and which this book itself was a victim of.

This isn’t meant to be a glib jab at McManus, whose own politics do not share this censoriousness. But it is worth remembering that at the time Althusser was writing, Marxist Humanism, which McManus champions, was specifically the state ideology of the post-Stalin USSR and the official communist parties. Let us recall that this language of “freer and more well off as a historical destiny” was just as well used by those who undid the Prague Spring with authoritarian violence, invaded Hungary, and for whom the nickname “tankie” was invented. This was actually existing Marxist Humanism! If McManus’ point is to show that he takes this humanist promise more seriously than his predecessors, then all the power to him. However, it would seem that in order to put this more serious version of Marxist Humanism into practice, one would need a little more than a vocabulary, which certainly Khrushchev, or even Stalin, did not lack. One needs a theory of history and society, and not merely a descriptive one, but a causal one, which would allow one to discern the potential different consequences of different strategies. This isn’t to say one cannot find traces of such a theory in the pages of Jacobin or even in the writings of McManus himself, but to show that the central claim of this normativity argument just doesn’t hold up. It does not simply follow that because normativity is important that Marxism requires a normative vocabulary, or that Marxist Humanism or any other ideology should have an exclusive claim on such a vocabulary. Unless, perhaps, you were to think the primary strategic consideration was how to win a debate about normative preferences, which is a plausible line of thought for the Jacobin milieu, whose practical-sensuous reality is consumed by such debates.

In contrast to McManus, Hamilton takes Althusser somewhat seriously as a philosopher of science, but not without making certain key misreadings and errors himself. For example, Hamilton claims that Althusser excluded the whole empirical element of science from his theory until 1966 due to scolding he received from the French Communist Party (PCF) for theoreticist and sectarian deviations. This simply isn’t true. In Reading Capital, Althusser only insists that the categories of a theory or structure relate to each other as abstractions, such that a theory of the relationship between economics and politics doesn’t explain empirical data of politics through an abstract theory of economics, but that the empirical economics may relate to the empirical politics, which can be described by an abstract theory of the relationship between economics and politics.^[1] In this case, the empirical relates to science specifically through the relationship of the empirical to its abstract category, which is nothing more nor less than the basic structuralist insight that before we can establish the relationship between certain phenomena, we must break up the continuum of experience of the phenomena into signs.

Probably a more relevant error when it comes to the question of Marxism as a science is Hamilton and McManus’ agreement that Althusser was attempting to create an alternative criteria for scientificity vis a vis Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability; the idea that scientific claims must necessarily be open to refutation. But Althusser does not do this. In his book Philosophy for Non-Philosophers Althusser states outright that “the British philosopher Popper was right to insist on this condition (the risk of experimental refutation), even if he worked it up into an idealist philosophy of the conditions to which a theory must subscribe in advance if it is to be certain of squarely confronting this risk,”^[2] emphasis mine. Considering this clear statement on Popper, what exactly was Althusser getting at?

Althusser begins Reading Capital with a reflection on Marx’s extraordinary discoveries in Capital, specifically, that Marx discovered something within classical political economy, an answer to a question which was never asked, which is to say, he had discovered a conceptual oversight. It’s worth quoting Althusser at length here:

We have reached our real problem, the problem that exists in and is posed by the actual identity of this organic confusion of non-vision in vision. Or rather, in this observation of non-vision, or of oversight, we are no longer dealing with a reading of classical economics through the grid of Marx’s theory alone, with a comparison between classical theory and Marxist theory, the latter providing the standard – for we never compare classical theory with anything except itself, its non-vision with its vision. We are therefore dealing with our problem in its pure state, defined in a single domain, without any regression to infinity. To understand this necessary and paradoxical identity of non-vision and vision within vision itself is very exactly to pose our problem (the problem of the necessary connection which unites the visible and the invisible), and to pose it properly is to give ourselves a chance of solving it. How, therefore, is this identity of non-vision and vision in vision possible? Let us reread our text carefully. In the course of the questions classical economics asked about the ‘value of labour’ something very special has happened. Classical political economy has ‘produced’ (just as Engels will say, in the Preface to Volume Two, that phlogistic chemistry ‘produced’ oxygen and classical economics ‘produced’ surplus value) a correct answer: the value of ‘labour’ is equal to the value of the subsistence goods necessary for the reproduction of ‘labour’. A correct answer is a correct answer. Any reader in the ‘first manner’ will give Smith and Ricardo a good mark and pass on to other observations. Not Marx. For what we shall call his eye has been attracted by a remarkable property of this answer; it is the correct answer to a question that has just one failing: it was never posed. (emphasis original)^[3]

What Althusser is referring to here, of course, was the strange omission of classical political economy, whose orthodoxy had found that labor is the source of all value, and then questioned what determined that value, and found the cost of reproducing that labor in subsistence goods. The discrepancy, then, between the cost of subsistence goods and the full value of the goods produced by the laborers that are reproduced, was treated either as a residue or the result of some deeper metaphysical relation between the value and the capitalist. In other words, the bourgeois political economists had posed one question: what determines the value of commodities, but answered it with the answer to an entirely different question, which is what determines the value of labor as a commodity, i.e. wages.

What’s important here is not the particulars of this history, which is probably well trodden by now, but the sort of operation Althusser is doing, and which he draws out in his work. Classical political economy didn’t make an incorrect claim, but they were nonetheless excluding certain facts because they were, for various reasons, not motivated to see them. Ideology may not always be deceit as in a lie, but it does tend to make us ignore things that are inconvenient to us. On the level of class societies, this entails whole sciences which are motivated to ignore certain facts. Althusser does not merely claim that many sciences don’t meet the level of falsifiability; he states, explicitly, that Marx applied the very same requirements on his science as those which were imposed on other sciences that had achieved autonomy as a field and merely applied these requirements into a new domain.^[4] But this domain was not accessible to the bourgeois sciences, and to this day they refuse it. Some have compared Althusser’s theory of science to Thomas Kuhn’s, and indeed there are some similarities. But what truly differentiates Althusser as a philosopher of science from all others is that he is concerned with a particular type of science. He provides a philosophy for the heterodox science, of the science which is suppressed and dissident.

For the more general philosophy of science, the process for a scientific field or theory to go from dissident to mainstream and orthodox is a simple one. Despite all the bitterness, acrimony, and even persecution of the dissident scientists, eventually the insurmountable evidence is accepted by the broader scientific community due to their common possession of reason, or something to that effect. Althusser, whose theory of ideology identifies universities as tools of state ideology production, believes that the divisions of class society produce ideological blind spots that are more enduring and systemically necessary. By the same token, however, Althusser doesn’t simply affirm any set of ideas which are suppressed by this ruling ideological system, but sets out, very carefully, criteria for appraising these suppressed ideas, to see which might rise to the level of a science or not. This problem is especially acute because in the case of the establishment of a new science, which is also the case for Marxism, one cannot rely on the existing standards for scientificity as they are already stated but must figure out how to translate those standards to a new domain.

There are two essential criteria that Althusser sets out for appraisal of these dissident sciences. One is that it should have a connection to a material object which establishes as a material fact a new dimension of knowledge. For the ancient Greeks this was the geometric compass, for Galileo it was the telescope, for Lavoisier it was oxygen, and for Marx it was the proletariat and surplus value, which are two sides of the same coin. This first criteria is established from the standpoint of a philosophic materialism. The second criteria is the individual judgement of the militant, who, when faced with the philosophical problems created by the new science, can stand to do battle on equal footing with the ruling class ideologicians known as philosophers, the model of this militant of course being Lenin, the auto-didact.^[5] These criteria allow one to identify a heterodox science, but do not replace the criteria that Popper establishes, that the claims of the science need be open to refutation. But for the practitioners of any given heterodox science this is a simple matter, that is, of utterance, articulation, and not any standard which should dissuade them in advance. That is, all that it would take to return Marxism to a science by the standards of falsifiability would be for Marxists to make falsifiable statements.

Hamilton doesn’t recognize this status of Althusser as a philosopher of heterodox science in part because, wittingly or not, he is playing the part of a partisan of the non-factional orthodoxy, the orthodoxy that does not permit any dissent. Whenever the PCF and Althusser come into conflict, except on the issue of humanism, Hamilton always appears to take the side of the PCF, whether in the assessment of Althusser’s theory, as I mentioned earlier, or on the issue of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where Hamilton critiques Althusser’s support for it on the basis of it leading to destabilizing factionalism. This is a position which is only really tenable from the perspective of upholding the ban on factions within the party, the ban which itself produced the destabilizing sectarianism that almost led to civil war in China. It is one thing to do an honest reappraisal of the actually existing communist states, in comparing their accomplishments against their various crimes. It is another to support the very foundation of their tyrannical excesses, the faction ban and the censorship and persecution it led to. Althusser, who never called for the abolition of the faction ban despite his many criticisms of the Party, at least had the alibi that he may have been expelled if he did.

In this context, Hamilton’s reading of Althusser towards the end of his essay is somewhat troubling; specifically, his attempt to incorporate Althusser’s theory of science into a theory of rupture with the logic of the commodity. Here, he borrows a lens of analysis from Alfred Sohn-Rethel who criticized Althusser for supposedly failing to take the concept of real abstraction literally enough regarding commodity fetishism, for making the concept too metaphorical. Sohn-Rethel rejects Althusser's notion that this abstraction of commodity fetishism happens “in thought”, instead arguing that it occurs in a “spatio-temporal” sense, and from here, he asserts quantification as something inherently connected to the commodity form. Hamilton points to that which cannot be captured within this quantifying logic of the commodity as points of resistance to capital, such as the social reproduction that occurs outside the capitalist firm, or the environment. He claims that unlike quantitative bourgeois science, proletarian science goes beyond the mathematical and mechanical world which originates in the logic of the commodity.

For one, I don't think it's true that Althusser saw real abstraction as a metaphor, as a materialist structuralist he likely saw this as a question of the materiality of thought. Secondly, this distinction between a quantitative bourgeois science and a more qualitative or immanent way of knowing is certainly not something that follows from Sohn-Rethel's work, who, after examining the example of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, states that: “what emerges from these examples is, first, that the science indispensable for socialism is methodologically the same as the science in capitalism; second, that socialism has the means to counteract the properties which, in capitalism, constitute the bourgeois character of this science” and notes how, in the case of protecting the environment in socialism, this is only accomplished by the unity of all scientific knowledge and the deprofessionalization of the scientific knowledge used in production.^[6]

It's notable that when Hamilton corrected McManus on the role humanism played in Althusser's thought he omitted a crucial detail. It wasn't just the case that Althusser was opposed to humanism on strategic grounds, he was also opposed to its use within science, as a way of grounding reality in the sensuous. This is one of the things he criticizes the early Marx for, who grounds the realism of the concepts in The German Ideology in terms of their sensuousness. This is also one of the things that connects empiricisms to humanism, a shared epistemology ultimately grounded in something being real because it feels real or otherwise more concrete. The modern day heir of this sort of epistemology is standpoint epistemology, and there's even a somewhat direct connection through Lukács and intersectional Feminism, whatever that's worth. This is also the remainder we are left with if we remove all quantification or scientific theorization from our epistemology. In contrast, Marxism, as a scientific project, would not shrink from the responsibility of actually quantifying social reproduction or the environment, as this would be necessary for creating a rational method of production. Specifically, a system which would not destroy these other domains through its ignorant operation.

Therefore, what troubles me when Hamilton discusses “why a Leninist thinking of rupture, in politics as in science, is needed,” is that this does not necessarily mean a political rupture, the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc., which, for all the dangers involved, would at least be a straightforward application of orthodox Marxist doctrines. Rather, what comes to mind is the old utopian and idealist demands that reality conform to some ideal, that, if ever implemented in an actual political program, would likely lead to some irrevocable disaster, but which, in the meantime, is more likely to fizzle out in the idiosyncratic sloganeering of some sect. In other words, the very alternatives to scientific socialism that we are quite familiar with by now.

The Jacobin Epistemology

It's at this point that Ben Burgis interjects with some praise for Analytical Marxism. This tendency of Marxism is diverse, but, as he says, has its origins in G.A. Cohen’s 1979 book Karl Marx’s Theory of History. I read some of Cohen’s work in a college philosophy class on freedom (the only philosophy course I ended up taking), where his essays were included alongside those of Hayek, as well as a few others. It wasn’t bad, and I also amused myself watching a number of Cohen's impressions of famous historical figures on YouTube. It did strike me that Cohen’s essay contained nothing particularly Marxist, however. As for Burgis, he finds the following aspects of Cohen as being worthy of praise:

(a) his insistence that it’s useful to reframe and clarify Marx’s insights in language quite different from Marx’s own (often Hegel-infused) terminology, (b) his willingness to jettison aspects of Marx’s empirical analysis that are in tension with the results of more recent social science, and (c) his interest in the normative dimensions of socialist thought.

Following this, he quickly remarks that those that object to Cohen usually do so on the grounds of (c) first, then (b), then (a), which seems to me quite accurate.

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.

For example, in discussing the controversy over the transformation problem Burgis states:

One concern leading some of these economists away from Marxist orthodoxy has to do with the ‘transformation problem’ that vexed Marx long before he came out with Capital Vol. 1, and which has continued to vex orthodox Marxist economists. How can we account for the extreme divergence (indeed, it seems to many observers, the lack of any obvious relationship at all) between the market prices of commodities, which remember are supposed to be at least a distorted reflection of labor-time value, and the average socially necessary labor time it takes to produce them?

The trouble is, this last sentence is totally misleading. There is no empirical divergence between market prices and labor time, as a number of studies have established a robust correlation between the two. They have even been the topic of a somewhat important debate between Andrew Kliman and Paul Cockshott. There are arguments that these correlations are spurious, but it remains a fact that there is a correlation, rather than some extreme divergence, and indeed, labor correlates better to prices than many other common cost inputs to the production process.^[9]

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.

Instead Beggs seems to say declining returns to scale was always a common sense assumption, and omits the fact that this assumption of declining returns is required for demand to matter at all in the determination of long term equilibrium prices. If he was to submit his “Zombie Marx” essay to any legitimate history of economic thought undergraduate course, Beggs would probably receive a “D-.”^[13] Now, Beggs’s essay isn’t all bad in other areas and he makes valid criticisms of Marxist economists like Harvey and Kliman. But the essay is undermined by such a poor grasp of the facts. And so Burgis is undermined by not thinking to check the many claims which so neatly support his point of view.

If we’re speaking of updating views in light of new research, it’s worth noting that one of the central conceits of the transformation problem was that the labor theory of value predicted that profit rates would be lower in capital intensive industries, whereas Marx and everyone else assumed this wasn’t the case, that industry profit rates should effectively behave like bonds where the market will adjust to equalize the returns. But recent empirical research has shown that profit rates are actually lower in capital intensive industries,^[14] probably because fixed capital isn’t fungible and can’t just be ripped up, repurposed, and moved around to get an average return. Of course, this doesn’t conclusively, empirically prove the labor theory of value. You'd probably need extremely detailed and accurate input-output tables for a whole economy to do that, but I definitely feel that both Burgis and bourgeois social science are overplaying their hand in this critique of Marx’s economics. So too is taking these economic concepts seriously extremely generative in terms of a scientific research project, as various works in the field of Classical Econophysics have shown.

An example through which one can better understand the consequences of this bad epistemic relationship to the social sciences is the role that European social democracy versus Soviet communism plays in the worldview of Jacobin’s brand of Democratic Socialism. In Burgis’ praise of Cohen, he adds the following on the topic of the USSR's place in Marxist theory:

Translating a point made by Cohen in one of the extra chapters in the 2000 edition of KMTH into the language of the distinction made here, the fall of the Soviet Union, widely understood as a falsification of Marxism, was actually a vindication of at least the forces-limiting-relations component of that theory. While Marxists themselves would of course have preferred an economically viable and politically desirable version of socialism to have emerged in the USSR to the cold comfort of having our theory confirmed, a flourishing socialism emerging at such a low level of development of the productive forces would have dramatically disconfirmed that theory. And understanding this point is not only relevant to rearguard debates with the few remaining Stalinist and Maoist deadenders who think such a leapfrogging would have been possible.

I’m somewhat astounded at this claim. It strains credulity to imagine that the productive forces of 1917 would have such causal power over events nearly a century later, after some of the most immense economic transformations in the history of the world.

Burgis here cites a book by Steve Paxton, one of Cohen’s students, who gives a treatment of the post-Stalin USSR lasting only a handful of pages, and instead spends most of its time establishing that, indeed, capitalist social relations had barely taken hold in Russia by the time of the revolution. That this vast simplification of history sort of looks like Marx's original theory if one squints is not very comforting.

On the other side of things, McManus draws from European social democracy as the basis for contemporary Democratic Socialist strategy. From its failure, he says, we should learn the lesson to “[build] major civil society groups and the democratization of the workplace through rebuilding the labor movement and entrenching its power more comprehensively.” He further points to the Meidner plan as the model for a democratic transition away from capitalism. Essentially, McManus believes that social democracy was defeated by neoliberalism simply because working class civil society wasn't strong or entrenched enough. This is also Chibber’s conclusion in The Class Matrix and the point of departure for Ackerman’s attempt to debunk the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. I think it's safe to say this is more or less the official Jacobin line. But it simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny. That this is the case becomes apparent in the final, and I think most successful, essay in the book.

The Limits of “Bourgeois Socialism”

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.

I mentioned the Kalecki profit equations earlier because they are useful here. Kalecki noted that profits were equal to capitalist consumption + investment + government deficits + trade surplus.^[15] If we assume a fixed social working day and rate of exploitation, such that overall surplus stays the same, then increasing investment has to come at the expense of one of these other categories, usually it must come at the expense of capitalist consumption. So too must government deficits lead to decreased capitalist consumption, all else equal. But, luckily for the capitalists, there is one more variable they can use to avoid sacrificing consumption, and that is the trade surplus. If the trade surplus turns into a deficit then it can counteract some increases in either government deficits or investment. The import-substitution scheme, however, prevents this solution as well by putting up obstacles to imports. These government policies, therefore, had two major consequences: (1) they steadily increased government debt, and 2) they steadily led to a decline of the surplus available for capitalist consumption.

For a variety of reasons, this debt became unsustainable, eventually leading to the various peso and debt crises. With the end of currency and import controls, the trade deficit exploded, so too were government deficits rained in, relaxing the pressure on capitalist consumption. A de facto neoliberalism, as Vargas put it, eventually set in. Unlike neoliberalism in the US and UK, Mexico seemingly didn't see any reduction in investment rates as a result. However, the end of “bourgeois socialism,” as Vargas called it, does go to show a fundamental trade off in economic development; the same one the Soviets faced in the question of “primitive socialist accumulation.” That is, the investment required for development must come from somewhere. You squeeze the domestic population, be that capitalists, workers, or a third class like peasants, as the Soviets did, let foreign capital use its own investment power and allow foreign capital to reap the surplus as a result, as most of the developed world does, or you can squeeze foreign capitalists through more competitive industries, as the Chinese currently do. Out-competing leading countries is difficult and at this point in global industrialization it requires the accumulated aggregation of many sophisticated technical capabilities (something that likely requires some combination of the first two investment strategies to work anyway if you’re starting from scratch). In other words, if import-substitution was ever going to work, it would have required a level of expropriation and direct state control of productive investment somewhere between Soviet high communism and post-collective China, where although the capitalist class persists, it is highly disciplined by the Chinese Communist Party and must abide by the state arbitrarily directing investment.

The reason that Mexico lacked this ability to control or squeeze its domestic capitalist class to an extent sufficient enough to develop its productive forces was political; the same reason that Vargas speaks of “bourgeois socialism.” What Vargas takes pains to show is that this development project, while supported by working-class civil society, was from beginning to end a project of the bourgeois ruling class. The severe repression of the Left by the Mexican government in the 1960s and 70s is proof enough of this, just as is all the historical facts with regard to the PRI’s origins and function. This bourgeois socialism is more or less equivalent to the sort of politics found all across the Fordist period in the West, of Social-Democracy, and the US New Deal, and was just as common elsewhere in the developing world. The problem of bourgeois socialism is, even if it causes the capitalist class to sacrifice some consumption to develop the productive forces, it will never be able to force any sacrifice which could existentially threaten the existence of this domestic capitalist class. While this essay’s arguments are perhaps too tinged by unequal exchange theorists' emphasis on the role of wages in development for my taste, they are not too far from the mark in pointing to the problem of the political power of this capitalist class.

If I think Vargas and Hamilton are too essentialist and pessimistic on the nature of the Western developed countries and the possibility of political change there, they nonetheless hit on an essential insight which eludes Burgis and McManus: “If the history of Mexico in the twentieth century has taught us anything, it’s that ‘bourgeois socialism’ is not adequate to achieve developmental goals; that the forces of authentic socialism must be capable of organizing themselves — as well as seizing power.”

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.

Keeping the Flower Alive

In Flowers For Marx’s introduction, Daniel Tutt provides an eloquent description of the role that public reason and the fight against censorship played in the intellectual development of the young Marx. In the stunted liberalism of the Prussian state, Marx realized that public reason would fail under conditions of censorship. Tutt points out that this argument applies just as well to the more diffuse censorship that occurs on the Left. Many of the authors here pride themselves on opposing this censorship, deplatforming and canceling, etc, and wish to claim the mantle of public reason on the left. Not so fast. There remains a more subtle, yet deeply entrenched, historical censorship on the Left represented by these two camps. On one side, the deference paid to the authority of bourgeois science as the only science, and on the other, the deference to the authority of the party in controlling theoretical practice. This epistemic deference is no small thing, even if it seems small compared to the petty tyrannies of censorship we experience today, for it will be the basis for any forum of debate on the Left if unchallenged.

Here, I think it's worth quoting Rosa Luxemburg from her constructive criticisms of the Russian Revolution: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.”^[16] This freedom is also the essence of any science, for it's when Marxism loses its ability to articulate dissent, whether to the expert authority of bourgeois social sciences, or to the central authority of a party, or any other authority, that its flower withers, and the weeds of dogmatism rise.

1. “According to the economistic or mechanistic hypothesis, the role of the essence/phenomena opposition is to explain the non-economic as a phenomenon of the economic, which is its essence. In this operation, the theoretical (and the ‘abstract’) is surreptitiously substituted for the economy (since we have its theory in Capital) and the empirical or ‘concrete’ for the non-economic, i.e., for politics, ideology, etc. The essence/phenomena opposition performs this role well enough so long as we regard the ‘phenomena’ as the empirical and concrete, and the essence as the non-empirical, as the abstract, as the truth of the phenomenon. The result is to set up an absurd relationship between the theoretical (the economic) and the empirical (the non-economic) by a change in partners which compares the knowledge of one object with the existence of another – which is to commit us to a fallacy…we are dealing with a short-circuit between crossed terms which it is illegitimate to compare: for to do so is to compare the knowledge of one definite object with the empirical existence of another!” See: Louis Althusser, "Part II: The Object of Capital," in Reading Capital, 1968, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/reading-capital/ch02.htm.

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2. Louis Althusser, Philosophy for Non-Philosophers (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017).

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3. Louis Althusser, "Part I. From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy," in Reading Capital, 1968, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/reading-capital/ch01.htm.

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4. "Marx’s requirements restate in a new domain the requirements which have long been imposed on the practices of those sciences which have achieved autonomy. These requirements often conflict with the practices that have reigned and still do reign in economic science, practices which are deeply steeped in empiricist ideology, but this is undoubtedly because of the youth of this ‘science’, and also because ‘economic science’ is especially exposed to the pressures of ideology: the sciences of society do not have the serenity of the mathematical sciences. As Hobbes put it, geometry unites men, social science divides them. ‘Economic science’ is the arena and the prize of history’s great political battles.” See: Althusser, "Part II: The Object of Capital," in Reading Capital, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/reading-capital/ch02.htm.

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5. Louis Althusser, "Lenin and Philosophy" in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 1968, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/lenin-philosophy.htm.

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6. It is clear that any rupture between capitalist and socialist science is not in methodology for Sohn-Rethel, but in the social status of scientists and experts: “What emerges from these examples is, first, that the science indispensable for socialism is methodologically the same as the science in capitalism; second, that socialism has the means to counteract the properties which, in capitalism, constitute the bourgeois character of this science. These properties are: that the basic categories of science are of the second nature and totally alienated from the qualitative realities of the first nature; that science is compelled to single out its objects as isolates; and that it must be carried out as an intellectual exploit.”

   “I regard my argument against the theory of reflection as applied to natural science of major political importance. From it must follow the conclusion that the enactment of science in unbroken continuation of its tradition as practised in the capitalist world is incompatible with socialism. It may well be that science and scientific technology have not yet reached a stage where a socialist transformation can emerge from the bourgeois tradition. But unless the development leading towards this stage is carried under the revolutionary impetus of the proletarian forces, as appears to be the case in China, then socialist transformation, when it becomes due or overdue, will require a proletarian revolution to overturn a hardened technocratic class-rule based on intellectual privilege.” See: Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Brill, 2021).

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7. Seth Ackerman, “Robert Brenner’s Unprofitable Theory of Global Stagnation,” Jacobin Magazine, September 12, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/09/robert-brenner-marxist-economics-falling-rate-of-profit-stagnation-overcapacity-industrial-policy.

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8. Nicolas D. Villarreal, “The Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, Crisis and Reformism,” Pre-History of an Encounter, September 16, 2023, https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/the-tendency-for-the-rate-of-profit.

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9. This also contains a section on the non-equalization of profit rates. See: Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, “The Scientific Status of the Labour Theory of Value,” paper presentation at the Eastern Economic Association meetings, April 3-6, 1997, https://users.wfu.edu/cottrell/eea97.pdf.

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10. Thonaas M. Humphrey, “Marshallian Cross Diagrams and the Origins of Supply and Demand Geometry,” Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, https://www.richmondfed.org/~/media/richmondfedorg/publications/research/economic_review/1992/pdf/er780201.pdf.

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11. Karl Marx, “Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two,” Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch00.htm#1885.

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12. See Marx’s attacks on Samuel Bailey, and the anonymous author of “Observations on certain verbal disputes in Pol. Econ., particularly relating to value and to demand and supply” including in Chapter 1, Volume 1 of Capital.

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13. Just as a test I put the question “How did classical political economists before Marshall think of supply and demand?” to Google's Gemini AI and it produced a more correct and coherent answer than the Jacobin writers, and with helpful citations including to primary sources.

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14. Nils Fröhlich, “Labour Values, Prices of Production and the Missing Equalisation Tendency of Profit Rates: Evidence from the German Economy,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 37, no. 5 (2013), 1107–26, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23601783.

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15. M. Kalecki, Theory of Economic Dynamics (Routledge, 2013).

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16. Rosa Luxemburg, "Chapter 6
    The Problem of Dictatorship," in The Russian Revolution, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch06.htm.

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