notes-politics-notesOnEngelsSocialismUtopianAndScientific

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm

I skimmed this to try to answer the question, on what basis did the initial proponents of communism feel that it had the right to present itself as a 'science'?

I did not find an answer. Along the way i took a few notes.

Engels' metaphysic vs dialectic modes of reasoning

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch02.htm contrasts two modes of reasoning, 'dialectic' and 'metaphysical'. Afaict dont exactly correspond with any current concepts, but 'dialectic' might be taken to be 'focus on/thinking in terms of processes and dynamics, the idea that outcomes might be contingent on historical events, wholistic thinking, continuous' and 'metaphysical' might be taken to be 'focus on/thinking in terms of eternal laws, steady states, and optimal situations, reductionist thinking, discrete/binary' (interestingly to the contemporary mind, he groups wholistic with contingent, and reductionist with optimal states or steady states; whereas today i would say that, 'wholistic thinking' makes me think of 'steady states', because it is by setting derivatives to zero that we assume an equilibrium, and this links together the various state variables and shows how, in any given equilibrium solution, the various parts of that solution are in balance).

For example, he says that the idea that something is either 'alive' or 'dead' is metaphysical, and the idea that you can't inarguably pinpoint a single moment when something comes to life or when it dies is dialectic. He says that Darwinian evolution is dialectic, because it focuses on process and historical contingency, and he says that the idea that the solar system was eternal is metaphysical whereas the idea that it had started out as a nebulous mass and tranformed into its current form, and would cease to exist as such sometime in the future, is dialectic.

He implies that the idea of looking at "all previous history as a crude heap of irrationality and violence" is metaphysic, and that a dialectical approach to history sees it as "the process of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof".

He claims that "The Hegelian system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage but it was also the last of its kind.

It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable contradiction. Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the conception that human history is a process of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence of this absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectic reasoning. "

Socialism is a science due to 'the materialistic conception of history' and the concept of surplus-value

However, at the bottom of https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch02.htm , he proclaims that socialism became a science when it discovered "the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value". I still don't understand how those things qualify it as a science.

note to readers: 'the materialistic conception of history' is the idea that the main driver of history is economics. Contrast to theories in which the main driver is the contingent histories of great individuals, or political situations, or war, or ideas. The name 'materialistic' refers to the idea that the primary thing in reality is matter (as opposed to mind; the theory that mind is primary is 'idealism').

Wikipedia's interpretation

"Engels later argued that utopian socialists failed to recognize why it was that socialism arose in the historical context that it did, that it arose as a response to new social contradictions of a new mode of production, i.e. capitalism. In recognizing the nature of socialism as the resolution of this contradiction and applying a thorough scientific understanding of capitalism, Engels asserted that socialism had broken free from a primitive state and become a science." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_socialism

"Scientific socialism refers to a method for understanding and predicting social, economic, and material phenomena by examining their historical trends through the use of the scientific method in order to derive probable outcomes and probable future developments. It is in contrast to what later socialists referred to as "utopian socialism"—a method based on establishing seemingly rational propositions for organizing society and convincing others of their rationality and/or desirability. It also contrasts with classical liberal notions of natural law, which are grounded in metaphysical notions of morality rather than a dynamic materialist or physicalist conception of the world.[ " -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_socialism

"...social relations and notions of morality are context-based relative to their specific stage of economic development. Therefore as economic systems, socialism and capitalism are not social constructs that can be established at any time based on the subjective will and desires of the population, but instead are products of social evolution. An example of this was the advent of agriculture which enabled human communities to produce a surplus; this change in material and economic development led to a change in social relations and rendered the old form of social organization based on subsistence-living obsolete and a hindrance to further material progress. Changing economic conditions necessitated a change in social organization." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_socialism

" The philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies characterized Scientific Socialism as a pseudoscience. He argues that its method is what he calls "historicism": the method of analyzing historical trends and deriving universal laws from them. He criticizes this approach as unscientific as its claims cannot be tested and, in particular, are not subject to being disproven." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_socialism#Critique_of_scientific_socialist_methodology

My comment

Seems like Engels' distinction between metaphysic vs. dialectic did not catch on (or at least, did not happen to be taught in the particular classes that i happened to take in school). Nowdays, it is generally accepted that discrete/binary reasoning (not in the sense of binary logic, but in the sense of pre-assuming a discrete distinction between natural language concept such as alive and dead) is often misleading; but there is (a family of) a popular/consensus formal logic system for encoding discrete reasoning, and no popular/consensus formal logic system for the alternative (except for in the realm of probability, but that's not quite what we mean when we say that it's hard to place the exact moment of something switching between alive and dead; although an argument could be made that the formal system for working with that sort of stuff might be equivalent to the one for probability, this is not a consensus/popular viewpoint). So, still today, people talk about 'wholistic' reasoning being lamentably absent from 'reductive' reasoning, but (imo) because the latter has been formalized better than the former, the latter is still used more in practice.

The idea of 'process thinking' has imo been unified with/absorbed into the standard school of reductionist thinking by way of mathematical dynamics.

The idea that the economic systems of the past are an evolution, and that some economic systems may be insupportable in some historical situations, is now generally accepted so much that this assertion is not named anymore.

The idea that economics is the main driver of history is now considered skeptically; it is thought that we don't yet have the means (neither in terms of theory or of data) to decide if there is a single 'main' driver, and if there is one, what it is. In the face of the lack of knowledge, these days people seem to think that a good guess is that there is no 'main' driver, and that all of politics, economics, and ideas play a major part, and possibly even individual decisions.

The idea that socialism is 'scientific' is not currently thought to be true, but this is possibly due to changing use of the word 'science'. Nowadays 'science' is taken to refer to disciplines utilizing the (current conception of the) scientific method which produce relatively reliably results. By the yardstick of (current conception of the) the scientific method, Marx and Engel's writings do not qualify, so imo modern speakers would not regard this body of thought as 'science'.

Bonus: what on earth is dialectical materialism?

Wikipedia has a page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism

It sounds like: