The Pseudoscience of Engels

I’ve been reading “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” by Fredrick Engels, written in 1880, and I’m afraid to say that I have large doubts about quite how it can be called “scientific”. This is, of course, not limited to Engels. The appropriation of the term “science” by a wide range of different disciplines occurs because to label something scientific gives it an extra cache of respectability, hence we have “Christian Science”, “An Institute Of Astrological Science”, and Hegel’s “Science of Logic”

An excellent outline of Engels approach is given by Jesús Muñoz:

“Historical materialism is the central assumption that social changes must be explained in terms of class struggles, wherein the economic basis of society determines the nature of social classes and the details about class struggles.”

“According to the economic interpretation of history, the current system as a mode of production will be self destroyed by its internal (dialectical) contradictions after passing through several phases, wherein labor and workers gain greater relevance. In other words, at the outset of Capitalism there arises a dialectical evolution which is reflected in recurrent crises (fueled by contradictions between labor and capital), and generate a change in the rules of the game. A new system will then arise wherein co-operation bypasses competition”

Engels indeed notes that:

“All past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange — in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period.”

And then he goes on to outline the stages through which history moves, which he calls “historical evolution”:

Let us briefly sum up our sketch of historical evolution.

Mediaeval Society — Individual production on a small scale. Means of production adapted for individual use; hence primitive, ungainly, petty, dwarfed in action.

Capitalist Revolution — transformation of industry, at first be means of simple cooperation and manufacture. Concentration of the means of production, hitherto scattered, into great workshops

Severance of the producer from the means of production. Condemnation of the worker to wage-labor for life. Antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Growing predominance and increasing effectiveness of the laws governing the production of commodities. Unbridled competition. Contradiction between socialized organization in the individual factory and social anarchy in the production as a whole.

On the one hand, perfecting of machinery, made by competition compulsory for each individual manufacturer, and complemented by a constantly growing displacement of laborers. Industrial reserve-army. On the other hand, unlimited extension of production, also compulsory under competition, for every manufacturer.

Partial recognition of the social character of the productive forces forced upon the capitalists themselves. Taking over of the great institutions for production and communication, first by joint-stock companies, later in by trusts, then by the State. The bourgeoisie demonstrated to be a superfluous class. All its social functions are now performed by salaried employees

Proletarian Revolution — Solution of the contradictions. The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The  development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master — free.

It’s a wonderful utopian picture, in which Marx and Engels find this “ultimate explanation” which makes sense of history, and provides stages on the path to Utopia which alone can “trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.”

But anyone who has studied the history of life on this planet will soon come to realize what a great role contingency plays.

As Stephen Jay Gould argued, something may be selected for some reason at one time and then for an entirely different reason at another time, so that the end product is the result of the whole history of an evolutionary line, and cannot be accounted for by its present adaptive significance.

And the same is true of human history. There is no preferred direction or vector of change. The Whig view of history, which still dominated some of the history I read at school, presented history as a long line of progress towards a better society and greater freedom. The view of Marx and Engels only differs in what they consider to be the better society, but it suffers from the same flaw.

Two modern historians - Robert Brenner in his work “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe” and and Ellen Meiksins Wood’s “The Origins of Capitalism” show how histories explaining the rise of capitalism have what might be described as a a dominant teleological model of capitalist inevitability, although Marx and Engels go beyond that to the revolution.

Brenner and Wood’s explanations, by contrast, emphasises the accidental and contingent in history, which led to the dominance of the market. One of the glaring problems with explanations of inevitability is that in fact trade and urbanization has flourished widely in human history without capitalism developing. Rather than capitalism being the natural evolution of any market to which all societies tend once obstacles are removed, instead they show that the development of capitalism was a chance event and, moreover, that it is a late and localized product of very specific historical condition.

History which attempts to “trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena”, such as Engels does in “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” fails to understand the contingent and accidental nature of history. There are no “inner laws” in history. What may be progress in one generation may be lost in the next.

But Engels had a final trick up his sleeve. If anyone criticised his theories on scientific grounds, he would simply exclaim "bourgeois science", and use that accusation to dismiss his critics. It is a technique which neatly sidesteps the notion of truth and for which their is no easy rejoinder because it discredits reason itself.