TRASHFUTURE - Riley's Commie Book Club - Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History

Episode Date: June 27, 2019

As of next month, all episodes of Commie Book Club will be published on on our Patreon feed... BUT without any paywall in front of them at all. So they'll be free each month with no delay. If you nonetheless want to support us anyway and get next month's book club early, check out www.patreon.com/trashfuture/ Another instalment of Riley's Commie Book Club delivered to you, our delightful and beloved patrons. This month, Riley decided to take it in a bit of a different direction, and talk about an under-discussed field of study, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science. How should we think about knowledge, what is knowable, and how these questions are related to history and power? To get to these questions, he reads from Helena Sheehan's Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History. The focus of the book is on charting Marxist approaches to the philosophy of science from Engels to the mid 20th century, and while this is interesting, Riley focuses more on the underlying concepts. He absolutely encourages you to look into the book and the actual history it tells, though! It's linked here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2565-marxism-and-the-philosophy-of-science

Right, so today we're doing something a little bit different for Kami Book Club, because that's right, you guessed it, it's only me talking, no one's yelling over me, everything's going to be quite organized, Hussein's not going to do the weird thing where he just knows a lot about the TV of the 90s. No, I'm doing something entirely different. And we're doing something entirely different from the normal book clubs as well, because the book today we're sort of discussing as kind of a secondary concern to a larger discussion. It's called Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, a critical history, and it is by Helena Shea, who's an American professor of the Philosophy of Science, and would probably

identify as like a humanist Marxist, which is more than a Gramsci than a Stalin. And it's a much more directly academic book than I would have done in the past. It's like this one and State of Insecurity are more likely to be encountered in like graduate seminars than in like waterstones. That's why we do this show. Well, that's why we do this show within a show of this show. It's certainly not why we do TF. And it seems like an odd choice, right? I don't usually do this kind of thing. I try to take something that's more directly political and talk about how it can be used and understood, how you can take its ideas and apply them in your daily life, or just because it's interesting or just because I feel like

getting sent a free book by Verso. But I'm very interested in the whole element of the philosophy of science when it comes to the way that we understand the world around us, and the way that that has been colored by ideology in the past, and the ways in which dialectics and Marxism specifically can provide us an alternative way of looking at what facts are. And as such, because this book is a critical history of Marxist philosophies of science. So you might say critical approaches to the study of natural sciences, although that's not a duality that a Marxist approach to the philosophy of science would probably countenance. It's just the one we'll use for now. I'm actually mostly mostly interested in the first and last chapters,

which set out what the basics of a dialectical approach to a philosophy of science is. And we'll get into how that works. And also because very little has been written on the subject. No one has written like, like Chantel moves for a left populism takes this idea of, well, here's what left populism is. And I mean, I'm expounded over the course of a short book. And then here, there's the idea go out and play with it, go out and play catch with the idea. This very little on the has actually been written in that way. So I'm kind of taking the first and last chapters of this book, which is really about different kinds of mostly Eastern European philosophers of science. And I'm sort of almost like taking the parts that I like

and then putting that together with other stuff that I've just sort of researched over the years in my many research involved jobs. So if you wanted to talk about a Marxist philosophy of science, like the most sort of trite thing you could do would be to go back to the Theses and Feuerbach for its most pithy and famous and statement that's most often misquoted that I'm going to misquote now, which is until now philosophers have merely interpreted the world, the point is to change it. And from a philosophy of science perspective, this is really asking, do we see ourselves as part of the world we are criticizing and engaged in as a critical project? So do we see our own sort of motive power and labor as a scientist, for example, joining in with other forces to produce

a larger movement in one direction or another, etc., etc., or is some sort of imperfect sensor that perfects itself as it becomes more and more disconnected and dispassionate and removes itself from the data? And this is really one of the fundamental things that philosophy of science looks at, one of the fundamental problems, and one of the fundamental things that makes a Marxist philosophy of science so unique, which we'll get into. And before we sort of jump into further of the philosophy of science, I'll say further, the reason I'm doing this is because I think that when a lot of liberals and uncles and stuff claim things like socialism has never worked, they're effectively making what amounts to a scientific claim. It's a bad scientific claim,

it's not correct, but they are saying on the basis of this evidence, I believe there is, it is a repeatable proposition that this form of government produces human misery. And this episode of Kami Book Club is going to look into what makes this a scientific claim, what conceptual basis it rests on, so less about evaluating its evidence, counting bodies or whatever, and more about evaluating its core framework and why it fundamentally misunderstands that socialism as a political project and indeed dialecticism as a way of seeing the world rests on an entirely distinct conceptual framework. It deals with a whole different set of concepts. And one caveat at the beginning also to lay out, as I go through a lot of these topics,

I'm not going to drain them. I'm not even going to go through them fully. Instead, my goal here is just to illustrate how different conceptual frameworks function in broad strokes so that we can all think of the question socialism has never worked, the question, the statement, socialism has never worked or whatever, in a critical way and think of how to approach thinking about answering it. So what is philosophy of science as it's traditionally defined, especially as it might be traditionally defined by what you might call the mainstream? So the reason it's philosophy of science and not the science of philosophy is that fundamentally it's a branch of epistemology, which is a field of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge,

which is specifically concerned with the sub question, what makes knowledge scientific and how's that distinct from other kinds of knowledge? And its core problem is called the demarcation problem. So if you're to think right now about what makes scientific knowledge different from other kinds of knowledge, there's actually very little about the data itself that will make it different. There's no hard and fast way to distinguish what is called science from knowledge that is called non-science. For example, my understanding of my friend's emotional state is not usually considered scientific knowledge, but what if I had a theory that taking my friend's beer away from him would make him angry, a secondary theory that anger would cause a rise in skin

temperature, and then I hooked up a thermometer to his skin, then took his beer and observed the result. Suddenly, my awareness of my friend's emotional state is no longer on one side of the demarcation problem as a just sort of me being aware of an emotional state, ambiently thinking about stuff, but is science. But there are many problems with setting scientific knowledge up this way, and I'll deal with them later. However, this also makes the discipline relatively fraught, because one of the things that we talk about a lot on a comic book club is how a lot of things are blithely assumed to be real facts and others as window dressing. So think about an impact study on fracking that treats the profits for oil companies as real facts and the immiseration of

the people there beyond the depression and economic activity, which is one of the real facts. It's weighed up against the oil company's profits, largely as window dressing. This is at base, a philosophy of science problem bleeding into the social world or vice versa, because it sees there are some things that count, that are data, that we can rely on, that are publicly shareable, and then there are some things that are just, you know, different people call them different things. The cucks tend to call them ideology. Engels called it metaphysics or philosophy. Other people have just called it feelings, so Ben Shapiro, facts don't care about your feelings, really is saying that the line of

the demarcation problem is wherever I feel like it is, according to whatever Wikipedia summary I read recently, and everything you think is feelings, everything I think is facts. One of the reasons that's so ironic is that because Ben Shapiro is particularly dumb, like unusually stupid, he has clearly set his demarcation line between science and non-science in a quite sort of obviously random, emotionally satisfying way. So whenever sort of you come back to, you know, Ben Shapiro, like, ah, you're the snowboard, or whatever, all your feelings, whatever, really what you're doing is you're saying you are a bad empiricist. You're not very good at distinguishing between what is science and what is non-science. Of course,

it doesn't really matter because of ideology, blah, blah, blah, but still, that's the basis of what we're doing and the basis of how it actually crops up a lot in everyday life. So here's a summary statement from Sheehan's book on what a Marxist approach to the philosophy of science is. So she writes, the most significant features of Marxism in respect to these problems are, one, that it has seen scientific theories as inextricably woven into broader worldviews, two, that it has made extraordinarily strong claims regarding the socio-historical character of scientific knowledge, three, that it has not tended to perceive these aspects as being in any way in conflict with the rationality of science. So one of the key things we'll look for is

the way in which most mainstream thinkers have looked at the demarcation problem as one of pulling back and further and further and further away from the data so we can get to a pure and pure idea of what science is. And they all basically can be understood as different flavors of either empiricism, rationalism, or positivism, all of which share a few things in common. I'm mostly interested in empiricism because it's the one that most lazy people mostly use most of the time. So it's completely discredited as an actual approach to any kind of academic discipline, but it's the way in which like Drunk Uncle's reason and Ben Shapiro. So this is also from Sheehan. The tradition stemming from the Vienna circle, so this is the 20th century origins,

early 20th, late 19th century origins of this desire to make pure the sciences, arose out of the impulse to defend scientific rationality in the face of the challenges posed to it by new developments in science. So they wanted to defend their own perception of what science was against new developments that were actually challenging their dreams of their own objectivity. So in an atmosphere of crisis and the epistemological foundations of science with all forms of rampant rampant obscurationism feeding off this crisis, they strove to set science upon secure foundations. They sought to purify and cleanse the intellectual inheritance of the ages of all superfluous accretions to clear that out the slag of the centuries to subject

all belief to clear light of reason and the rigor of experiment. They did so, however, from a base that was too narrow, employing criteria that were too restricted, leaving out of the picture too much that was all too real. Rigidly separating the context of the discovery and the context of justification, the logical positivist and logical empiricist schools took only the latter to be the proper concern of the philosophy of science. So the context of discovery is who's finding it, where, why, and how. The context of justification is, well, what you're finding, how tightly provable is it? I think the one of the best places we can look is, remember Reinhardt Rogoff? Reinhardt Rogoff was the paper that justified austerity. It was

by these two guys, Reinhardt and Rogoff, called Growth in a Time of Debt. And it basically said that if you borrow too much, if your debt to GDP ratio is out of whack, then you're going to have a recession. And it was found that in the context of their discovery was it was a well-funded and popular study that was big in the liberal think tanks. It got propagated through the liberal think tanks. It was read by George Osborne on the floor of the House of Commons. It was then proven to be entirely untrue. Nothing. There was nothing there. There was nothing in it. And yet, it has maintained its characteristic as the facts. The facts say that Jeremy Gorbin's going to make us all 70s Venezuela or whatever. But generally, those people are drawing on a set

of facts that was proven to be wrong. It's just that the context of its discovery was such that it's still acceptable. Other things that can count as sort of the context of discovery would be findings of uneven uptake of social programs among African Americans. For example, you can say, oh, well, this social program doesn't work. No one takes it up. But no one ever thinks of the fact that, say, all of the people running the trial were white. You know what I mean? And so, they say, well, those are real scientific facts. Only these things that we can count are real scientific facts. And by the way, we decide what is possible to count. So in this attempt to try to be very narrow and reasonable, what they essentially did was just launder pro-systemic

prejudices through the language of empiricism. So empiricism, I want to go in on that a little bit more. Scientific knowledge is gained through excensory experience. That's the core tenet of empiricism. I can't know if something is true until I've seen it or smelled it or seen the data point. So I don't necessarily have to see the phenomenon. I just have to obtain sensory evidence of the phenomenon. So I can't see a proton go around the particle accelerator in CERN, but I can see that it's been hit a detector and like, okay, I now have empirical proof. But what kind of knowledge counts as experience? And what is knowledge? I mean, the common refrain of the sort of rump empiricist is that knowledge is justified true belief. So I know something is

true. If it is A, true, and B, I have a reason to believe that it's true. So if I was to say one person listening to this has lifted their left hand up off the table, that might be true. That might be true that one person is doing that right now. I have no way of knowing it, so I can't claim knowledge of that. So let's take another example of one of Mr. Shapiro's statements. Israelis like to build things, Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. Aside from some twee almost swearing, for our purposes here, this statement is nearly the, from a philosophy of science perspective, this statement is nearly exactly the same as the statement without British colonialism Africans would still be living as savages. It's basically Ben looking at what he has interpreted to be a

set of facts that Gaza is not a very nice place to live, or that a lot of Africa has underdeveloped, and then making inferences based on those facts that he has observed about a much larger truth. So this is called induction. It's where you take small bits of data, and then you can say, well, based on these bits of data that I've looked at, I'm now going to reason to another truth. It just so happens that Ben Shapiro is trying to do induction to having recently experienced, I don't know, a stroke, or get an oxygen deprivation for a very long period of time, and so just makes genuinely moronic inferences. So that's, and what that kind of reasoning is called synthetic, because it means you're putting certain things together. So I'm, I can reason from

a number of, so I'm trying to look around the studio to do some synthetic reasoning. I can reason that Hussein sits on the back left chair in our studio for a number of reasons. I know that he usually sits there. I know that he's very messy, and there are several used coffee cups in that area. I know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I've put together these things, and I've synthesized an answer. Analytic reasoning, on the other hand, would be deductive reasoning. So something that's universally true that you can know without any kind of resort to experience. So deductive or analytic, an analytic statement would be all bachelors are unmarried men. So in the definition of bachelor is unmarried men,

so I can know that to be true rationally. Anyway, so this is the kind of statement that we're thinking about, and this is how we're thinking about statements about truth based on evidence. They're either picking lots of evidence and making a larger inductive statement or taking something that's just universally true, making a deductive statement. And one of the big problems is that analytic truths are basically uninteresting because mostly they're tautological, and synthetic truths are prone to this thing called the induction problem, or the inductive fallacy, which is that you could conceivably keep gathering information for something and then keep confirming it. So like I said, we're going to go away from Sheehan for a while, and then we're

going to go back to Sheehan. So this is me going away from Sheehan because we're now going to go through the development of, you might say, mainstream approaches to the philosophy of science as they've happened over the last 100 years, starting from that Vienna circle that we were talking about earlier. And it's all attempts to solve the induction problem. And you solve the induction problem by finding the demarcation line. These two things are closely related because you know what the boundaries of scientific knowledge are, and then once you do that, then you can reason much more dependably. It's not the same problem, but they're related problems. And so this is now sort of what we're going to look at. So the first one we're going to look at

is AJ Ayer, who was a verificationist. He was an empiricist, and in fact a logical positivist. For our purposes, they're not that different. Most people wouldn't say they're super, super different. There are going to be people who are listening to this who are like, fuck you, they are different. And yes, I know they are, but for our purposes, not significantly. AJ Ayer was a logical positivist, and his whole purpose in his writing, language, truth, and logic, was basically to rule out metaphysics as a possible field of inquiry. So he was writing in the sort of, I don't know, 100 years ago, and he was basically being like, look, all of this high-flown moral reasoning about what is the good, what are our moral intuitions,

what are ethics, et cetera, et cetera, it's very, very difficult to do because you can't experience them. So really, it's just my word against yours. We'll come back to that later with Wittgenstein. And so he was trying to say, look, I don't want to rule this out, I'm just going to say you can't do it. So he says, metaphysics means, if you don't know, there's the things which are not physical. So like God or happiness or whatever. So a metaphysical explanation of happiness is like, oh, it's when your spirit glows because you feel great. A materialist, not our forms of materialist, but like a reductionist materialist explanation would be happiness is when certain chemicals are released in your brain, et cetera, et cetera,

et cetera. People who talk like that, who are making themselves seem very stupid, are basically doing what AJ Ayer was doing all those many, many decades ago. So he writes, metaphysicians make statements which claim to have a knowledge of reality which transcends the phenomenal, meaning the world, meaning the world of stuff. So this microphone is phenomenal. I don't mean it's a phenomenal microphone, although it is. It's the gold one, very pleased to be podcasting on it. It means rather the phenomenal things of the things that exist in the world. If I can pick it up, I can hold it, it exists, it's phenomenal. Happiness is a concept you could say is phenomenal and as much as it's connected to real stuff.

Meaning that I can say that I feel God looking down on me. I'm not saying something meaningful. So I say, I feel God looking down on me. It's not meaningful because it's not something that someone else could sense. I can't verify it and you can't verify that I'm experiencing it. So we can't act as though it's factual or even has any meaning. What I can say according to someone like Ayer is, I am experiencing an electric charge through my head that is causing me to perceive a religious experience. This is something that if you hooked me up to a MRI machine you could scan for and say, yes, I can verify that you are feeling that. This is obviously very silly because it's impossible to obtain evidence, sufficient evidence for nearly anything. So it

doesn't really solve the inductive fallacy and also it's actually very hard to obtain conclusive causal proof of stuff. So for example, even like with a linear regression, it's very hard. I don't know. I'm only going to try to spend too much time talking about statistics but essentially what a linear regression does is it tries to look for correlations. So on average, as I go upstairs, on average my height increases for every stair I go up. So plot that in the x-axis, plot that number of stairs in the y-axis, it will go up by a certain amount. So there's a slope function where for every x I go over, number of stairs climbed, my height goes up by a certain amount. Now that's not always the same and we can establish

correlations by looking at averages and averages of averages. And so for the average step I take, let's say for the average step I take walking across town, you measure my height and then we look at the correlation between number of steps I've taken from my house and the height I'm at. You can say the farther I've got from my house, on average, the higher I go up. Now that's a very bad, and it won't be the same each step. That's a very bad linear regression because it's not really meaningful because it's, well, the height I go from my house in one particular direction along one circular path, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, it's not very generalizable. A lot of this stuff is instead used to say like, well, for every pill, if you take this pill

for a certain number of days, then your fever will go down by a certain number of degrees on average. It's how people make these predictions. But because it's not actually exact, we use something called a 5% confidence interval, which means if it happens, if that relationship exists at 95% of the time, then it's, yeah, we say basically it's strong, which means one out of every randomized, one out of every regression test is wrong because it'll find a correlation that is not supported by our decision to have a 95% confidence interval. Again, statisticians listening to this are probably furious because I'm basically criminally summarizing how this inference is. Just to be, it's more to talk about A or than it is to talk about

regressions, please. I'll talk about regressions all the time, just between you and me, not on the show. So that's what it means. It's very, very difficult to do this. So by way of another small digression, the incentives for every truth-seeking industry, so let's say pharma, under a profit or different system, embed us in the problem of induction because if everything is reducible to advertising, then you just have to convince people to purchase a drug rather than prove that the drug is safe, which means you could, if you weren't ethical, you could just keep running randomized control trials until you more or less got the result that you wanted. So we really can't do much with verificationism because it sort of, except for really, really easy stuff like walking

up the steps, as soon as you confront it with that much uncertainty or with that much complexity, it sort of falls apart. So Karl Popper comes along and purports to solve this problem by turning it on its head. Rather than attempting to verify theories, we'll try to falsify them. So this passage from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but by the way, it's a fantastic resource. If you don't know about it, it is a basic and relatively accessible summary of more or less every concept in philosophy, and I say basic because it's, some of these are more basic, but it talks about everything at its proper level of, you could say, discussion. Anyway, this really nails it for Popper's theory. So in a critical sense, Popper's theory of demarcation

is based on his perception of the logical asymmetry which holds between verification and falsification. It is logically impossible to conclusively draw universal proposition by reference to experience, but a single counter instance conclusively falsifies the corresponding universal law. In a word, an exception far from proving a rule conclusively refutes it. So instead of what, when instead of looking to sort of verify our theory of gravity, what we're going to do is say, okay, we know that objects in space are attracted to one another on the basis of gravity. So for example, I know that I can drop this lock and it will hit the planet. I also know that I can say, I could refute it by saying, in the absence of other forces, if I drop the lock and the planet

repels the lock, then I've disproven the theory that gravity causes stuff to fall down to the surface of the planet. And if you can't do that, if you can make a statement that could falsify it, and then you are unable to falsify it, to carry out that falsification, then it must be true. This is much, much, much, much, much more convincing in a purely theoretical sense. So let's put this back into the context of capitalism. A company like Purdue Pharmaceuticals will allow the problem of induction to seep into its clinical trials, for example, but it will use falsification for maybe, I don't know, allegedly, but it will use falsification for its legal defenses. That is, if there is a way you could attack them legally and show that they

disobeyed the law, that is, you know, falsify them, then they will not take this course of action if it can then be shown to lose them money. So what's true for Purdue is what's legally possible, allegedly, rather than what's medically desirable, allegedly. Verificationism for the, falsificationism for me. But here's the problem, is that this might be very, very tidy, sort of all on its own, but it's actually, unfortunately, still quite messy, because we can know things ourselves, but it's actually very difficult to know if we're talking about the same thing. Are these facts just things out there that are there waiting for us to be apprehended, are they just theories out there waiting to be apprehended, etc., or is it something that's

more socially constructed? And so you can then talk about Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose theory of language game problematizes this more. These concepts are not really experiences as such, so much as they are outcomes of linguistic exchanges upon another. For example, imagine there are a group of five people, each of whom is holding a box, and in that box is a beetle. However, none of them can open their, none of them can look in there, and the other people's boxes, they can open their own boxes, and look and say, ah, it's a beetle, and then close the box. Now, the really, the really interesting thing is that they can't, if they can't look and run another's boxes, they can still talk to one another

meaningfully about what a beetle is without seeing inside one another's boxes. And this is how we come to understand things like pain or experience of the color red. I don't and can't know what you call pain. What you call pain is something you feel in a particular way. Maybe it's the same thing that I feel, which I call pain, but we can, and we can talk about it to one another. But I can't actually look in your box. I can't go inside your head and experience what pain is. But we know pain is a, pain is something we treat largely as factual. So I can't verify or falsify what you experience as pain, but I can know that you're, what you're experiencing is pain. So really what's happening is a, is a series of language exchanges where we work these things

out and they become socially constructed. It's very, very interesting. So then finally, here is the final of the mainstream, if you like, thinkers that I'm going to talk about. And it is one that is also very interesting. Thomas Kuhn replaces the purely theoretical criticisms with one that is essentially sociological. Because like, for example, Popper may be describing a very theoretically tidy philosophy of science. It doesn't account for the way that science is actually done in real life and real science departments, which is that researchers have jobs that go away if their paradigm becomes unfashionable or disproven. So a lot of the time they invent ways to explain phenomena that would otherwise falsify their

theories in line with their theories. And that's ordinary scientific thought. And then revolutionary scientific thought is when someone comes along with a theory that falsifies one of the other theories while still, while still explaining all of the phenomena it explained usually plus more phenomena. And then it becomes a battle of publishing to see who can stick around the longest. And so this is what the sort of very, very brief and criminally summarized summary there is, I think, the very, very, very basic bare bones essentials of the mainstream line of development in the philosophy of science. I'm sure I've got a lot of things wrong, but it's the very core essentials. I've criminally summarized things. I'm so sorry.

In any case, so that's the like the line everyone draws, right? So in every political theory class, it's like, well, there was hubs, there was luck, and then there was Russo. It's that line that's always gets drawn that this is that line for this, where we go from the positivists in Vienna to Thomas, who are saying you must receive gather evidence to Thomas Kuhn saying, yeah, everyone just wants to keep their jobs. But Kuhn and people like Lakatos and Popper were really, really, really not fans of Marx and Kuhn less so openly aggressive to this other guy Emery Lakatos who sort of took Kuhn's theory one step further and looked at how research programs work and Popper who's, you know, Lib. So let's go back to Sheehan. The trajectory of this tradition

that I just described from positivism to the current variety of post-positivist philosophy of science has reflected the pressure of a complex reality upon conceptions too restricted to give an adequate account of it. The successive modifications of the tradition over the years from verification to falsification to the historicism of paradigm shifts to the methodology of scientific research programs to a pure dataism have been impressive but still inadequate attempts to come to terms with the metaphysical and historical dimensions of science. So how science relates to theory, thinking, history, or indeed concepts that like the good or whatever. So having pointed that to the fact that the very existence of demarcation criterion is in itself an ideological

project in one of the very core of empiricism, positivism, and its successor disciplines, let's go back in time and let's talk about Hegel and Marx. So here is what Sheehan says. Both of these earlier traditions play science within a much wider socio-historical context. So both meaning dialectical materialism or dialecticism more generally and the radical pragmatism of people like Dewey, but we're not talking about them right now. Both of these earlier traditions play science within a much wider socio-historical context than did Kuhn and his successors. They understood far better the relationship of the history of science to the history of everything else which undercut the possibility of such protected worlds

unto themselves as Wittgenstein's language games, Kuhnian paradigms, or Popperian third worlds. Their field of vision opened to a much wider world, their understanding penetrated to a much deeper historicity, their modes of thought were much more integral, and so they were not prone to the one-sidedness of later views. Their realization of the importance of hypothesis and deduction did not lead them to deny any role whatsoever to induction. So this hypothesis and deduction is still guessing and reasoning from larger principles, whereas educated guessing or abduction basically is a core element of science. It's what allows it to move forward. If you're always looking at the data that's come before, then you're just going to replicate what's

done before because empiricism always has this problem of looking backwards in time. Sorry, I've gone away from the book for a sec because even if I'm looking at a particle accelerator that just hit the sensor, I'm still relying on data from before, now, and time to then reason about now. And that's not saying that protons are going to suddenly start behaving differently, although I don't know, they might, but rather that if you are going to base your entire worldview of how you take in and process information, if you assume that things are basically stable, then it's going to be impossible for you to invent. It's going to be impossible for you to create a hypothesis. That's why neoliberalism is so stagnant. It's why growth and invention,

except of an app that cleans your shoes or whatever, has been sort of so forestalled, because neoliberalism is a fundamentally empiricist project. It's looking at all of the data that's come before, ever, as much as it can, and then looks at patterns that emerge from those data so it can then try to repeat the desirable patterns and not repeat the non-desirable patterns, thereby obviating risk. So it means that hypothesis and analytic reasoning are gone. It's gone. It's purely inductive and tries to beat the inductive fallacy with brute force. It's just, no, we're going to beat the inductive fallacy by eventually just having all of the data, by just having everything. And if you have everything, then you have a much better chance of beating the inductive fallacy.

You have a much better chance of demarcating everything into the world of facts and nothing outside the world of facts. So you solve the demarcation problem by eliminating that, which is on the other side, and you solve the induction problem by just knowing everything. You have population-level data of everything. And in that case, you don't need hypothesis testing and you don't need deduction because you can just adduce. But that also requires that whoever is looking down at this data, there is a single point of power. It requires that there be one person who's keeping everything in order, who's overseeing everything that's known about every other person and who is then keeping the demarcation line of fact and not fact pushed all the way to one edge. So in order

to live in a world where you solve the inductive fallacy by sufficient collection of data, it's necessarily true also that it is an absolute despotism. So really, the neoliberal dream, when looked at as a philosophy of science project, which I'd seize itself as realistically because it sees itself as empirical and data-driven and all this, is basically a pharaoh, more or less where it goes when you think about the kinds of things it considers important, avoiding risk, knowing things, making predictable decisions, etc. It requires a pharaonic system. But without, of course, all of the shortcomings of the pharaonic system that allowed it to be taken over by dynasties, etc., etc., so essentially it contains its own contradictions. Who would have thought?

Anyway, let's go back. Their realization of the importance of hypothesis and deduction did not lead them to deny any role whatsoever to induction. Their awareness of complexity did not lead them to conclude that there were no unifying patterns. Their historicism did not entail discontinuity. Their acceptance of relativity did not imply incommensurability. Their enunciation of the quest for certainty did not bring them to despair, to announcements of the end of epistemology or declarations that anything goes. What's most striking about these earlier thinkers, especially angles, by the way, this is more riley editorializing, especially angles, is how much more robust they were, how much more they were able to live in open, uncertain, and unfinished universes with many

risks and no guarantees, how much more willing they were to stake their lot with uncertified possibilities. Really, I think the point here is that in many ways, liberal, in many ways, neoliberal, in many ways, capitalist, these approaches to empiricism are fundamentally a frightened of complexity and ambiguity because they are based on power and they're based on having power over things by demarcating them into known and unknown, by removing that decision from history, by saying science could not possibly be racist because I've defined science as the systematic quest for truth, leaving aside the fact that the methods of science, that the people doing science and all this happens in history and that in that historicized it has

been a way to cover for racism. Just because you've jettisoned the prejudices of the past, so you claim, how could you be sure you might have jettisoned the prejudices of the future? Surely, it is better to abandon this high-minded quest for control of an understanding of, excuse me, other people without any kind of reciprocal understanding. Anyway, so Marx and Engels saw the history of science, this is back to Sheehan, as unfolding in such a way that science was a cognitive activity carried on within the framework of a whole worldview, which was in turn shaped by the nature of the socio-economic order within which it emerged. Such a characterization of science took nothing away from science in their eyes. The science of

the past grounded in the worldviews of the past, grounded in the relations of production of the past had all been necessary stages in the evolution of human understanding. It was necessary to unmask the superseded ideologies of the past and present that distorted the development of science. So we go back to that whole thing about science being racist. It was necessary to look at the historical context of something like phrenology to understand that it was using the language of science to essentially advance the socio-economic agenda. But that this has been a stage in human understanding that brought us to where we are now, even if that stage was discarding it. I'm not saying phrenology, I'm not really wanting to say phrenology was necessary or desirable,

but that the growth of human understanding has, it's been a very rocky, bumpy ride. Hegel says that history is a slaughter bench, quite famously, and being wrong just not innocently, but being wrong evilly as we were has to be acknowledged and moved past. It's not that phrenology was necessary, but that unmasking of phrenology was a necessary moment in the development of science. So even more, so I'm going to say unmasking, like unmasking as quackery, so that even more it was necessary to move the process onward to the next stage, the further development of science in the context of a new worldview, in the context of a struggle for new social order and new relations of production. So we can say, for example, the general

desire to understand the relationship, say, of the human mind to genes or whatever. I don't know, human mind, sorry, that's a pretty tricky word to use in this context. Let's say the development of the brain to genes. Let's say that is something that might be desirable, and it took unmasking the previous prejudices of the old ways of doing it in order to get here. But also that you could never look beyond, say, the socioeconomic relations of the present in a project to map the development of the brain to genes. Are we doing it? If you're doing it in our society now, it will most likely be, I don't know, to give people jobs as soon as they're born or some other creepy shit like that. So the process of doing science, only one element of it,

is what we would consider traditionally to be science. And moving from, say, phrenology to a much less openly racist kind of gene mapping, those possibilities for oppression and just outright wrongness or whatever, are still very much there, and they're still coming from the world of the social. And so trying to exclude science as one thing that's separated from these other things that has these clear demarcation lines and so on and so on is complete nonsense. So we've said a lot about what a Marxist approach to science is not. What is it? So starting with dialecticism in general, because it always sort of goes back to that, what is dialecticism? It's essentially, and I'm sure many of you already know this, so I'll go

through it quite quickly, but dialecticism is an approach to the study of things. I'm going to be as general as I can, not just human history, but of things in general that is based on an opposing forces. So a thesis, something happens, an antithesis, the opposite happens, and a synthesis, a third thing that's a combination of the two then happens and becomes the thesis to a new antithesis. So one of the unique things about dialectics, and this is especially, makes it especially difficult to sort of hold in your head all at once, is that it's a way of seeing the world and in itself a philosophy of science that is based entirely on things in motion, rather than looking, holding things constant, taking things out of their context or looking at them while

holding still. It's about the understanding of connection, movement, and wholeness, rather than things on the basis of their parts. So, and also it deals in opposites quite a bit. So if we want to talk about the science a little more, go back to what I was just saying, it's an example of dealing in opposites. You can look at the book, The Dialect of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Dornow. The dialectic of enlightenment refers to the idea that through scientific discovery, we were able to free ourselves from mysticism, so thesis, mysticism, antithesis, science. And then the synthesis is a sort of mystified priesthood of science that is used to understand and control people. So the more we understand about, say, the natural

world, the more we were able to control it, but equally, the more we were able to understand about humans, some of whom are the natural world. So let's say workers to be timed and studied, the more than the few remaining human subjects, the bosses, were able to time and study them. So, far from being uncomplicatedly liberatory, which people like Steven Pinker would want you to think, the Enlightenment as a project was very complicated and far from just one thing to all people. It was the Enlightenment that gave us shit like phrenology and race science. And people like Steven Pinker are all too excited to explain that away rather than the working out of a complicated process of humanity coming to terms with its own spirit, its own desires, its own potentials,

and coming to terms with an understanding of the world. The latter one, the one I said, sounds more interesting than just some French guys invented thinking, but nevertheless. So this is how sort of dialectical reasoning proceeds, again, at its most basic. Marx is a dialectical materialist. He says, okay, the main force of the dialectics is material goods, is the relations of production. And these are the things that are moving on. So Friedrich Engels wrote this to Marx about dialectics and the sciences. This morning, while I lay in bed, the following dialectical points about the natural science has occurred to me. The subject matter of the natural science,

matter in motion, bodies. Bodies cannot be separated from motion. One cannot say anything about bodies without motion, without relation to other bodies. Only in motion does a body reveal what it is. Natural science, therefore, knows bodies by examining them in their relation to one another and in motion. Now, I'm actually less interested in talking about the dialectical approaches to something like, again, I'm only drawing this distinction because this is an hour-long show and not 24 hours, on things like more obvious natural sciences. So an example of this would be, if I drop a tennis ball on the earth, the tennis ball is in motion even when I'm just holding it, it's still being pulled on by the earth.

The earth is also in motion, still being pulled on by the tennis ball, not very much, but slightly. And then as I move my hand, the tennis ball falls, hits the earth, and the earth and the tennis ball work themselves out to a new position, but they're still both still more or less in motion in relation to one another and in relation to every other thing. Fun. So let's get specific and look at how we can take something that tries to break down a dialectic that tries to break down a dualism. So a dualism is a dialectic, say, not in motion. It's just, well, there's this here and there's this here and they're different and not related and they never touch and they're opposites. It's a dualism. Most of empirical science or empiricist philosophy of science

are based on that. And most sort of lazy Ben Shapiro style justifications for different kinds of philosophy of science also based on that. Anyway, this is from Capital about the nature of money. The reality of the value of commodities contrasts with the gross material reality of those same commodities, the reality of which is perceived by our bodily senses, in that not an atom of matter enters into the reality of value. We may twist and turn a commodity this way and that. And as a thing of value, it still remains unappreciable by our bodily senses. So the social relationships, not sensed, are entirely real and important. But also the restriction of what can be seen as fact, that the facts about a commodity or its function and its price, but not the labor relationship that

went into producing it and imbuing with value, even though those things are demonstrably real. So if I was to say that, you know, this chair that you're sitting on has no value, you'd say that's nonsense and say, okay, well, can you see its value? It's like, well, no, I can see that it's well made. I can see that it's got rollers on it. I can see that it's made of leather. And I'm like, okay, well, you must see the value. And it's like, well, no, I see these indicators of value. So almost it's like it goes back to Wittgenstein where we're saying, well, we have to work out what value is through language games. But the problem is, in addition to the fact that Wittgenstein was writing in the 20th century, and Marx was writing

considerably before that, is that working out what value is, is not just a language game. It is embedded in the power of the capitalist to say what it is and the power of the capitalist to obscure the labor that goes into something by presenting it just as a commodity with a price, et cetera, et cetera. And so this really shows that there is something very real here, it's something you can't see, and it's something that isn't just worked out theoretically. So how do you apply the demarcation problem to this? Well, I mean, it doesn't really fit, does it? Because you can say, well, it's sort of a fact, it's real, it's there. And in as much as it has through the relationship to the rest of society and through the motion of the economic interactions

of society, it has indeed plopped itself before me at a certain price for a certain value, I perceive that it's worth this much money, this much of my labor for this much of this other person's labor, sort of. And all of these things are very real, but also none of these things can be obtained through traditional empirical means. And also it's not just about what it is, it's about who says what it is and how, because the Wittgensteinian language game is played between equals. The Wittgensteinian language game is played by two people who are trying to work out what the beetle in the box is. But if the beetle in the box becomes a chair that's been produced by labor, and that labor is basically compelled to labor through wages,

because you have to sell your labor, then we're not really doing a language game that's being worked out through equals. We have, in fact, unequal access to the value of a chair. We have unequal access to setting it, to benefiting from it. And so taking these things and putting them into a realm of facts that are there to be obtained and worked with and thought about and pondered and whatever is sort of, it's like you're restricting yourself to one particular view of something, even though there are things about it that are demonstrably true, that you're just ignoring because reasons, because of, well, ideology. And these ideologies are very true. So this actually takes us back to that old cuck-tig chestnut. So the distinction between fact

and ideology, that Corbin's all about ideology and we're all about facts. We've spoken about the relationship between science and philosophy enough to know that, as we may paraphrase Engels, is one thing for there to be a natural world, it's quite another to then go about thinking about it, or it's quite another to see it in motion. And the idea that there are natural facts which are knowable, and then just social stuff and ideology and whatever, with a line of demarcation dividing down the middle of it between that which is scientific and relevant and that which is not, is not just a non-dialectical approach, so it's not just an alternative, but it's also basically a failure of reasoning and a failure to be internally consistent. It's essentially

a stupidity that arises from being in power. Your own assumptions seem so natural that either they just seem like facts, so something that Reinhardt Rogoff just feels like a factual relationship between things, like a correlation, causation rather, or it doesn't seem like anything at all. And so like as human action thought and scientific fact converge on say a set of pro-market assumptions based on quote unquote the facts, what you've actually done is catastrophically failed to realize that your position is even a position and that other positions are possible. So if you sort of get what I'm getting to now, it's that you can get to the thesis of capitalist realism from a position, from a series of arguments in the philosophy of science. It is all leads to

this same place where, I mean look, I wouldn't want to get to a description of capitalist realism in this way. I think the way that Mark Fisher does it is much more moving, much more powerful. I think it affects a lot more people, like I was able to show my mother, I was able to give the book to my mother and she loved it and was like, where's more? And I was like, I got news for you. But I think it's interesting to get there in a different way, to understand that you could also describe, again, you shouldn't because it's way lame-er, but you could also describe capitalist realism as a particular placement of the line of demarcation between fact and non-fact that privileges a set of ideologies. And I think one of the reasons that it's gotten so bad is that

it's become so transparently fraudulent and that more gaps appear in that gray flatness are that by being in power for long enough, the champions of capitalist realism are now Matt Hancock and Ben Shapiro. They don't need to be particularly clever because they have all of the resources in the world behind them. Anyway, so that's just a fun little trail to a bonus thought. So let's conclude on what I talked about at the very beginning. The statement of, according to the facts, Marxism has never worked. I want to unpack this statement starting with the afterward to the 1993 edition of this book. Arguably, Marxism is still the only mode of thought capable of coming to terms with the complexities of contemporary existence. It is

still unsurpassed in its capacity for clarity, coherence, comprehensiveness, and credibility. Within its resources are perhaps the only possibilities for penetrating the meaning even of events that its previous adherents never anticipated. The potency of Marxism is not so much in any of its existing tenets, as in its habit of large-scale and deep-rooted thinking, discerning the trajectory of history as it comes, looking for a pattern of interconnections where others only see random chaos, going back further into the past, reaching wider within the present, facing within greater composure to the future. I think this is very true because Marx wrote about linen coats. He didn't write about cryptocurrencies or the large-scale financialization

or whatever. He didn't write about this kind of thing. The toolkit that he gives us is not a series of equations that you can run on a set of defined economic outputs because that's not useful. It's not interesting. That's trivial. That's also the kinds of things that very serious think-tank economists say that if you don't do that, then what you're doing is ideology, not fact. Of course, this means really what they're doing is they're saying, I have narrowly boxed the facts into what I consider to be the facts. If you don't consider that, then you're a moron, whatever. I disagree. What we're looking at instead is the tendency of Marxism to, as a critical pathway, as a way of thinking, as dialectical materialism, as a philosophy of

science, is less about any of these particular predictions or bits of analysis in capital so much as it is about understanding of the interconnection of ideologues, the ideology, of understanding the ways in which the definer of a word may have an interest in the definition of that word, and in its unwillingness to accept gloss. For example, when we say, socialism has never worked, that's something that people can say to one another to make themselves more comfortable with the fact that they're on the right side of history or whatever, but when we define what socialism is, you find that what actually they've done is they've, in their cloak of empiricism, they've said, well, socialism is everything that's ever bad and left-wing that's ever happened.

Conveniently excludes any sort of good left event. It excludes any kind of, even like social democracy, it will exclude the foundation of the NHS. I'm aware the NHS is not necessarily socialism, blah, blah, blah, spare me, but it is, say, a leftward lurch that brought the workers more control over their own lives by taking control of health away from capital. I'm aware it wasn't perfect for everyone, but we'll just go with it for now. Say, well, that wasn't that. It's like, okay, so what you're doing is you're placing the line of demarcation of the facts and not the facts, just where you feel like placing it. Also, if you look at the dialectical process of history, the USSR represented Tsarist Russia much more than it represented Yugoslavia and North

Korea represented the late Korean Chosun dynasty much more than it represented any other socialist state because you still carry forward the traditions that you came from. It's revolutionary change in its own context. Now, I'm not saying, again, these were necessarily bad developments. I mean, way rather live in the USSR than in Tsarist Russia. There can think of a lot of places I would still rather live in the USSR than now, but also define worked. Worked for whom? Worked to accomplish what? They never think, well, okay, well, hang on. Say, well, socialism killed all those people. It's like, okay, you define killed. It's like, well, 100 million lives were ended because of collective farming or whatever. It's like, okay, what was the enclosure movement?

Did that not happen here? Is that the product of socialism or is that the product of massive industrialization? Is industrialization to blame? Is industrialization always bad? Would you rather not have industrialized? Again, this is about placing that line of demarcation. It's not about trying to use necessarily a dialectical method to argue with your uncle, but understanding the way in which dialectics can help you realize that most of this argument is actually just someone who is demarcated between fact and non-fact in a way that suits them and is then going to belligerently yell at you over dinner. Then define has never, under what conditions facing what obstacles and moreover, what obstacles were specifically placed

there by capital against state socialist movements. Really, when you begin to unpack those questions, when you begin to look at the process of history as forces constantly moving with one another, you can't really just take one out and look at it by itself. When you understand the very construction of these facts as a social endeavor, then you understand that these debates are basically pointless. This is why Ben Shapiro is like, debate me. It's like, no, because Dave, the debate's pointless. It's not going to accomplish anything because you're a fundamentally unserious person. B, all you're going to do is just place the line of demarcation between fact and non-fact, kind of wherever you want. You're going to define and you're going to place everything,

all of my questions about what socialism worked and has never mean, on the other side of the line of demarcation. You're going to say, oh, you're making excuses and it's like, well, that's just a definitional question. Finally, you can say, look, I'm not saying you can say this to your uncle or Ben Shapiro or whatever, but we can say to one another that it takes dialectics to have a kind of forward look to try to do something more because, like I was saying earlier, the neoliberal approach is tied up with empiricism. It's based on the idea that we're going to look at what's happened before, which is why nothing new ever happens. It's because it has no ambition, at least with dialectics. You look at the world

in a way that is ambitious to do a new and different and better thing. They say it's never worked. It's like, yeah, because you were around and without capital to work against it and as capitalism is weakened more and more and more and the forces of capital are discredited more and more, so long as we can maintain a kind of class consciousness, maybe we will be able to do something better and we won't be constantly discouraged and broken up out of class consciousness by people constantly saying that neoliberalism is based on the facts. Who's? When? Which ones? In order to do what? Connected to what other things? We have the answers to those kinds of questions in a way that they do not. Anyway, that's all from me tonight. Thank you for listening to this

admittedly scattered, different, and strange episode of Kami Book Club. It's something I've been wanting to talk about for a while and it's something I hope you enjoyed listening to. I'm always open to talking about these things. Anyway, thank you if you're listening to this on May tomorrow or the next day or whatever day in May. Thank you for subscribing to our Patreon. If you're listening to this to add in whatever day in June, consider subscribing to the Patreon unless we've hit $25, $100 a month, in which case this episode just gets made for free and released as a fifth free episode every month. Hooray for bonus content. Anyway, what else? What are we plugging? I guess if you're listening to this in May, come to our live show on May 30th. I promise

there'll be much less discussion of the philosophy of science and much more, you know, japery. If you're listening to this in June, come to our live show in the Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Festival if you're in Scotland and our selling client. It'll be very fun to see you and I am hoping to see a lot of you guys there. Anyway, I think that is all from me. So, good night! you