Marx and Science – I

 Peoples Democracy Vol. XLIII No. 17 April 28, 2019

T Jayaraman

IT is a remarkable fact that at Marx's funeral, his life-long friend and comrade-in-arms Friedrich Engels chose to eulogise his friend's commitment to revolution in terms of his passion for science. Engels noted, “Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development in general. For example, he followed closely the development of the discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those of Marcel Deprez.”  But to note only this part of Engels' speech, would be to limit Marx's vision of science. Engels' brief oration begins in fact with Marx's contribution to the study of society, but characterised quite deliberately as a contribution to a science of society. Engels says: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

“But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.”

In the light of these passages, we must note at least four significant dimensions of Marx’s view on science. The first is Marx's characterisation of science as a “historically dynamic, revolutionary force.”  The second, closely related to the first, is his emphasis of the role of science in production and how the advance of productive techniques itself develops science. The third is Marx and Engels' view of science as the mode of cognition of reality, encompassing both the natural and social worlds. And the fourth is the profoundly materialist viewpoint of regarding science as the foundation for all other modes of understanding of the natural and social, including the aesthetic and the moral.

What is the significance of the third aspect, especially when one normally uses the term science mostly in relation to our cognition of the natural world?  Marx's views on science in relation to the natural world as well as his views on the science of the social world are in fact profoundly related. One does not quite appreciate the depth of Marx's profound understanding of science of his day and his vision of what science should be, a vision that is exemplified by his study of political economy, unless one appreciates also his unified view of the sciences. This was a vision that was built on the insights of both the materialist and the dialectical tradition in philosophical thought that he brought together in a unique kind of unification that marks his study of Capital. We shall return, farther on in this note, to this question of the relation between dialectical materialism and science in Marx's view, after we comment on the first two aspects in more detail.

Why is science a historically dynamic force? Marx's answer to this is not a simple one, but a carefully nuanced account. First, in a fundamental sense, science is a revolutionary force as an integral aspect of humanity's mode of understanding nature and the significance that this has in enhancing humanity's capacity for its mastery over nature. Second, scientific advance has a dialectical relationship with production, with particularly spectacular results in the era of capitalism. On the one hand, Marx notes, even the first, sporadic appearance of machinery in the seventeenth century, though it did not play a fundamental role in the era of manufacture (and Adam Smith was indeed correct, he adds, in assigning it a subordinate role in relation to the division of labour), was of “the greatest importance, because it supplied the great mathematicians of that time with a practical basis and an incentive towards the creation of modern mechanics.” But it is under the conditions that develop subsequently, that science comes into its own, as one of the determining features of the development and entry of machinery into the production process in a sustained manner and the subsequent advance of technology.

Science, especially the science of mechanics, is indispensable in replacing the worker's hands and the worker's simple tools with the machine. In Marx's words: “The principle of machine production, namely the division of the production process into its constituent phases, and the solution of the problems arising from this by the application of mechanics, chemistry and the whole range of the natural sciences, now plays the determining role everywhere.”  Subsequently, it is the demands of production that drive the development of science. Science is not merely the product of the “disinterested” labour of the mind, but draws its motive force from the expansion of industrial production. In criticism of Feuerbach's view, Marx notes that he “speaks in particular of the perception of natural science; he mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and chemist: but where would natural science be without industry and commerce? Even this ‘pure’ natural science is provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and industry, through the sensuous activity of men”.

More sweepingly Marx notes elsewhere, “Mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formulation.”

Thirdly, this is not a one-sided story. Nature's objective laws need to be discovered and understood and without such progress, even the inventions that humanity needs most cannot be conjured into existence by sheer will. Agriculture is the prime example in this regard. Without the necessary developments in geology, chemistry and physiology, “the sciences that directly form the specific basis of agriculture rather than of industry”, which take place especially in the later decades of the nineteenth century, productivity in agriculture could not rapidly increase, as industry had earlier. From this observation in the Theories of Surplus Value, it is clear that he recognised that the development of science was not merely an immediate response to economic demand as in a reductionist, or crude materialist, view. Some contemporary Marxist writers have missed this dialectical subtlety and as a result have extended this misunderstanding to argue that science (and technology) is somehow a class product and that capitalism calls forth the science and technology it needs without any objective constraints due to nature