IN PRAISE OF MARX

...When we now turn from Popper's two formal requirements for a valid theory to his third (material) requirement, that a theory must pass severe empirical tests if it is to be acceptable, we recognize at once that by no means all of Marx's theories, in as far as they 338 have been tested, have met this requirement...

...The theory is refutable...

...It was a pioneering exploration of a heretofore unexplored field that subsequently led to systematic and fruitful inquiries—and the whole area of sociological inquiry later called the sociology of knowledge is hardly conceivable without the stimulus provided by Marx's pioneering notion...

...Having previously believed that sexuality only emerged at puberty, investigators had failed to look at infants or young children for evidence of erotic activities and expressions of libidinal urges...

...p. 9. 6 Ibid...

...As distinct from social theories that conceive of classes as the embodiments of factors of production or as a layer cake in which strata are simply superimposed upon one another, it is Marx's view that classes are essentially conflict groups...

...What was to be done was to demonstrate the existentially determined nature of an entire system of Weltanschauung...

...That Marx's theory about the interrelations between thought and social existence, between ideas and position in the social structure, "led to the prediction of phenomena that had not so far been observed" is hardly open to doubt...

...But so is every other thinker...

...The investigator can now use this Marxian concept to explore the concrete conditions in which such consciousness is likely to arise...

...q 340...

...14 Ibid., Mentor edition, p. 153...

...EDS...

...The theory has not passed the test, to be sure, but it is worthwhile to consider whether the refutation of the theory is not due, at least in part, to what Robert K. Merton called a self-destroying or suicidal prophecy...

...12 Leszek Kolakowski, Marxism and Beyond (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969...

...An objective economic class, a Klasse an sich (class in itself), becomes a Klasse fuer sich (class for itself) if its members, through repeated conflicts with opposing classes, have acquired an awareness of the communality of their interests...

...In particular, and in tune with the other great intellectual tradition to which he was indebted, that of German idealism, in Marx's conceptualization of the functions of class, class awareness became central...

...I shall argue that Marx meets all of Popper's two formal criteria and that he satisfies in some of his work, though not in all of it, Popper's third requirement...

...Ideas, Marx maintained, must be traced to the life conditions and the historical and social situation of those who uphold them...

...Marx directs our view to the systematic consequences of the unequal allocation of scarce resources within social systems, and one of these consequences is the unequal allocation of scarce power...

...He specifies, moreover, that all historical societies are composed of social classes that have their roots in this unequal allocation of resources and power...

...To cite recent examples, two of the most important works in historical sociology of the last decade and a half, Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 10 and Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions," even though they depart in major respects from classical Marxian theory, have brought forward important results by modifying it in order to sort out the falsified chaff from the still usable wheat...

...There are, of course, other more specific theories advanced by Marx that fulfill Popper's first requirement, but I shall directly proceed to his second requirement, which, it will be recalled, demands that a theory must lead to prediction of phenomena not hitherto observed so it can function as an instrument of exploration...

...Marx's detractors often have been delighted to point to the formulations of such men as Winstanley or Guizot, which seem to resemble those found in Marx...

...What Popper has in mind here may best be exemplified by the work of Sigmund Freud, even though, paradoxically, Popper denies scientific status to Freud just as he denies it to Marx...

...p. 109...

...What is permanent in Marx's work will be assimilated in the natural course of scientific development.IS Yes, as the philistine will have it, Marx is one-sided...

...Conflicts between these classes, Marx argues, are necessary components of all historical societies...

...In the German idealistic tradition, human self-awareness or self-consciousness was an essential requirement of individual autonomy enabling people to become effective moral actors in the human drama...

...3 There is a considerable difference between assertions regarding the struggle between the rich and the poor, between inheritors and disinherited, or between powerful and powerless, and to stress, as Marx did, that the struggles between classes take their specific shape and character from the specific modes of production prevailing at a particular moment in historical time...

...In order to assess the value of Marx's theories, I have chosen to follow the lead of Sir Karl Popper...

...Granted that many thinkers since Francis Bacon have written about the connections between people's existential conditions and their mode of thought, it was Marx who was the first to explore systematically and in some analytical depth the connections between sets of ideas and the concrete social structure in which they emerged...

...It will suggest new inquiries, "and even if' in his words, "these should at once lead to the refutation of the theory, our factual knowledge will have grown through the unexpected results of new experiments...

...This requirement is not as essential as the other two, because, he says, "even a theory which fails to meet it can make an important contribution to science...

...Among the conditions Marx outlined for the growth of self-consciousness of social classes was the ease of communication between members of a class, which, in its turn, depended on the structural location of class members...

...he is willing to allow that even theories that have been refuted may make positive contributions to knowledge by stimulating inquiry or suggesting more or less radical modifications...

...but what matters here is that it has opened up a new and fertile territory of inquiry, and thus conforms to Popper's second criterion...

...I shall argue here that Karl Marx bequeathed us a set of theories that continue to be indispensable for the pursuit of a number of important sociological inquiries...

...And this was, I submit, a new powerful and unifying idea in social thought...

...Here economic or social factors were supplemented by social-psychological ones...

...Marx focuses on the way in which the relationships between people are shaped by their relative positions in regard to the means of production, that is, to repeat, by their differential access to scarce resources and scarce power...

...rather than of this or that individual idea...

...But, as Alfred North Whitehead once put it, "to come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two very different things...

...not merely a success of the scientist who refuted the theory but also of the scientist who created the refuted theory and thus in the first instance suggested, if only indirectly, the refuting experiment...

...The notions of class and of class struggle were, of course, not unknown in Marx's day...

...The testing of a theory, according to Popper, involves attempts to refute it...

...Just as Freud opened up for empirical inquiry the area of infantile sexuality and oedipal conflict, so Marx opened up a whole territory hitherto unexplored...

...Leszek Kolakowski, perhaps the most sophisticated present-day commentator on Marxian thought, provides the following characterization of the place of Marxism in the social sciences: . . . the concept of Marxism as a separate school of thought will in time become blurred and ultimately disappear altogether, just as there is no "Newtonism" in physics, no "Linnaeism" in botany, no "Harveyism" in physiology, and no "Gaussism" in mathematics...

...14 There is no need to bury Marx...

...6 Marx's theory of class consciousness provides a handle for investigating a whole series of problems not even recognized before his day...

...Marx argued in The Eighteenth Brumaire that French small peasants who were dispersed on their individual holdings in the countryside could not develop a common consciousness because of the lack of communication...

...There are, to be sure, other aspects of Marx's work that simply did not pass any empirical test...

...classes lacking such bonds among their members remain impotent...

...Even though orthodox Marxist true believers still exist, I am convinced that they are condemned to ultimate sterility...

...Some classes may not attain self consciousness and others will do so...

...When Freud developed his theory of the Oedipus complex and of infantile sexuality, he sensitized researchers to areas of human 336 behavior that hitherto had escaped scrutiny...

...Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966...

...Social living, according to Marx, can only be understood in terms of historical specificity...

...They could have learned all of this from the great non-Marxist sociologists of the past...

...but his aims were wider than that...

...With their recent "discovery" that the state has in the final analysis relative autonomy, or that the superstructure, after all, does not simply reflect the infrastructure, they are reinventing the wheel...

...182-83...

...Take, for example, Marx's theory of class consciousness...

...9 Robert K. Merton, op.cit., pp...

...Marx granted that particular individuals might not always have thought in terms of class interests, but he maintained that categories of people are constrained to do so...

...Cit., p. 241...

...Many hostile commentators have gleefully found that nothing of the kind actually took place and that the living standards of the working class in all industrial nations are considerably higher today than they were in Marx's time...

...Popper's third criterion, as distinct from the first two, which are concerned with the formal requirements of a theory, involves a material requirement, i.e., empirical success...

...Marx held that the further progress of capitalism would lead to an increasing immiseration of the working class...

...Marx transferred these notions from the domain of individuals to that of collectivities...

...I shall then argue that many of Marx's theories meet Sir Karl's requirement...

...Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (London and New York:Cambridge University Press...

...Though an aggregate of people, Marx argued, may all occupy similar positions in the process of production and hence have objectively similar life chances, they become a class as a self-conscious and history-making body only if they become aware of the similarity of their interests...

...As Alfred North Whitehead once put it, "Each mode of consideration is a sort of searchlight elucidating some of the facts and retreating the remainder.into an omitted background...

...The only major revolutionary developments of the 20th century have occured not in industrial societies as Marx expected, but in peripheral peasant societies—in exactly those societies that Marx had characterized as retrograde domains of the idiocy of peasant life...

...The middle classes, which he expected to be slowly ground into sociological insignificance between the two major historical grindstones, capital and labor, have been steadily increasing in all industrial nations in each census decade of the 20th century...

...could reach its final goal only when the interest-bound nature of ideas, the dependence of "thought" on "existence," was brought to light, not merely as regards certain selected ideas of the ruling class, but in such a way that the entire "ideological superstructure" . . . appeared as dependent upon sociological reality...

...They hence were "like potatoes in a sack," a collection of individuals without ties to one another, incapable of autonomous social action and easy prey for demagogues such as Napoleon 111.4 In contrast, Marx states in The Poverty of Philosophy and elsewhere,5 class consciousness and class solidarity would develop among workers when labor struggles over economic benefits, 337 physical concentration among masses of people in common workplaces, and easy communication among them would lead to solidarity and political organization...

...The second requirement postulates that "apart from explaining all the explicanda which the new theory was designed to explain, it must have new and testable consequences . . .; it must lead to prediction of phenomena . . . which have not so far been observed...

...A few examples will suffice...

...9 Responding not merely to his own dire predictions but also to those of a host of other socialist thinkers, from the early part of the 19th century on, that the lot of the workers would deteriorate with the further development of the capitalist mode of production, workers began to organize in selfdefense, creating mutual aid societies, trade unions, and labor parties...

...13 Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 54...

...Yet it remains true, Popper states, that further progress in science requires "not only successful refutations but also positive successes...

...8 Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 143...

...In sum, Popper's third criterion is only imperfectly met by Marx's theories, and in many instances it is not met at all...

...But even if a theory has been successfully refuted, its originator cannot be judged to have failed...

...And even though literary treatments and philosophical inquiries had for a long time focused on the evidence of strains and tensions in the relations between fathers and sons, it was only after Freud that systematic observation of oedipal tensions was undertaken...

...As these workingclass institutions gradually took hold in industrial societies, as the specific weight of these institutions increased and began to affect the balance of power, the ruling classes, whether from fear of revolutionary developments or from other motives, began to make concessions to the working classes, which, among other things, led to the gradual rise of the latters' standard of living...

...Marx's work abounds in similar explorations of new theoretical territory...

...Marx was concerned with the ways in which particular positions in specific social structures that arise from particular modes of production tend to shape the social experience of their incumbents and predispose them to actions oriented to defend or to attack a given allocation of economic and power resources...

...See also Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset, "Marx's Theory of Social Class," in Class, Status and Power, ed...

...More important, they gain their identity and the realization of the communality of their interests through confrontations and clashes with other, antagonistic classes...

...Many false theories have been more helpful in our search for truth than some less interesting theories which are still accepted...

...I now shall consider, although more briefly, one other Marxian notion that fulfills Popper's second requirement in that the theory points to hitherto unobserved phenomena or relationships and provides tools for exploring them: the theory of the social roots of ideas...

...2 Op...

...For false theories . . . may .. . suggest some more or less radical modifications, and they may stimulate criticism...

...Bendix and Lipset (New York, Free Press, 1966...

...Popper's third requirement, which he considers not quite as indispensable as the first two, is that a theory must pass some new and severe empirical tests...

...This book, and others like it but written in this country, could not have been produced without the exploratory work of Karl Marx...

...Yet this seems hardly necessary, since whole catalogues of Marx's failings are easily available from a host of writers who have made the listing of these failures into a thriving industry...

...Such stress on historical specificity is in fact another major hallmark of his approach to the data on human existence...

...Some of then, Malthus in particular, pointed to possible so irces of conflicts of interest between these classes, But Marx, although he usually made a functional distinction by defining class in terms of people's position in the productive process—a notion that was derived from the classical economists—also explored another dimension of class, namely that of class consciousness...

...Marxist orthodoxy's future lies largely in the past...

...E.P...

...5 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, n.d...

...Moreover, the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat in the West, on which Marx based his predications of the imminence of revolution in industrial countries, has been steadily declining as workers have come to conclude that in the modern welfare state they have considerably more to lose than their chains...

...it may only be partly correct...

...q NOTES I Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), pp...

...The classical economists, for example, did provide a functional classification of classes, distinguishing between proprietors of land, proprietors of stock, and laborers...

...2 Marx's overall theoretical scheme is built, as Popper says, on "some simple, new, and powerful unifying ideas about some connection or relation between hitherto unconnected things or facts, or new theoretical entities...

...By focusing analytical attention on the importance of power, conflict, and asymmetrical relations in human affairs, and by thus breaking with the tradition of harmony, integration, and symmetry, Marx broke ground on hitherto unplowed fields...

...pp...

...We print here the paper by Lewis Coser...

...He stated that the potential for class conflict is inherent in every differentiated society, since any such society systematically generates conflicts of interest between groups differentially located within the social structure...

...He was aware that such unequal access must not always lead to active struggle between classes, as demonstrated in his description of the century-long stasis of Asiatic societies...

...The industrial working class, far from increasing its specific numerical weight, as Marx expected, for several decades now has declined as a portion of the total labor force in all industrial nations...

...When classes do not develop self-consciousness through struggle they are historically ineffective, since their members cannot become autonomous social actors...

...But instead of the embalmed Marx we are apt to encounter among the writings of the orthodox, living Marxian thought, perpetually put to Popperian tests and requirements will, I am convinced, continue to help invigorate the social sciences...

...Only such self-conscious classes are capable of changing the course of history...

...I shall argue further that even those parts of his work that have been successfully refuted remain of 335 major importance in that, to quote Popper again, . . . a false theory may be as great an achievement as a true one...

...240-43...

...The first requirement for a new theory, according to Popper, is that it "should proceed from some simple, new, and powerful, unifying idea about some connection or relation . . . between hitherto unconnected things . . . or facts . . . or new theoretical entities...

...When the British historian E. P. Thompson wrote his classical work on the rise of the English working class he entitled it significantly The Making of the English Working Class...

...As Karl Mannheim put it: [Marx's] undertaking...

...Nevertheless, as I have been trying to show, we can dispense with Marx's contribution only at our peril...

...Yet even Marx's failings have had, as Popper suggests, beneficial consequences in that refutation of his findings have led to "more or less radical modifications" that would be inconceivable without his initial impetus...

...Among the unanticipated consequences of Marx's predictions about continued pauperization of the working class was the falsification of his law of increasing immiseration through the concerted action of the working class...

...145-46...

...He has laid down three essential requirements that a theory must fulfill if it is to contribute to the growth of knowledge...

...p. 204...

...But, as Popper seems to suggest, that is probably the 339 case with most other theories in the natural and even more so in the social sciences...

...The notion of the inevitability of class conflicts and of their functions as transformative agents in social change is, to be sure, found among writers long before Marx...

...The attainment of class consciousness is a historical task to be achieved, not a given condition...

...3 Alfred North Whitehead, The Organization of Thought, as quoted in Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, enlarged edition, 1968), p. 4 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire (New York: International Publishers, n.d...

...In particular, he made clear that selfconscious classes not simply exist, but that they are products of historical processes, the result of determinant relationships and patterns of communication between structurally interrelated human actors...

...On the contrary, "every refutation should be regarded as a great success...

...Yet we should recall that the third requirement is not as indispensable to Popper as the other two...

...The phenomenal rise of service and administrative white-collar strata, that is, of what Marx called "nonproductive labor," was only dimly foreseen by Marx and Engels...

...13 What distinguishes Marx from lesser thinkers in the social sciences is not that he is onesided, but that, just like Freud, to quote Whitehead again, "He had the genius to be astonished...

...This second requirement ensures that a new theory will be fruitful as an instrument of exploration...

...19 Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966...

...It would be easy to continue in this vein...

...The communality of interests among workers, Marx stated, would ab initio unite workers as "a class against capital, not yet for itself" But during the ensuing class conflicts "this mass becomes united and constitutes itself as a class for itself...

...He often used his uncovering of relations between ideas and the social positions of their proponents as a means of unmasking and debunking his opponents...

...Any historical society in fact presents a moving balance of antithetical class forces that generate change by their tension and struggle...

...7 He took from Marx the notion that classes are not given but create themselves under appropriate conditions, which he then proceeded to illustrate with instructive detail in the English case...

...Feuer said yes, Coser no...

...He lives, and he is our contemporary...

...Paradoxically, even though Popper has consistently denied the scientific status of Marx's contributions, it turns out that this status can be established on the basis of Popper's own criteria...

...To judge from their recent contributions, many of them seem to be involved in the attempt to save all of Marx's findings by, so to speak, adding a few epicycles, as was the wont of the disciples of Ptolemy over many centuries...