Science, Identity Politics and Back to Reality with Marx
Richard Westra (Richard Westra is University Professor (Habilitation Equivalent) at the Institute of Political Science, University of Opole, Poland and Adjunct Professor at the Center for Macau Studies, University of Macau, SAR China. He is author of 8 books and scores of articles and chapters in peer reviewed outlets. The discussion here draws upon his book Economics, Science and Capitalism published by Routledge: https://www.routledge.com/Economics-Science-and-Capitalism/Westra/p/book/9780367610425
Abstract: This article explores how positivism as a philosophy and methodology for science gave rise to the retreat from reality exemplified by postmodernism. It explains the way postmodernism lent credence to the fracturing of social oppositional movements into identity politics and the standpoint epistemology knowledge claims which supported this drift. What is argued is that critical realism philosophy of science reclaimed reality through its critique of both positivism and postmodernism. Further it is claimed that Marxism as conventionally construed left itself open to postmodern challenges that it constituted but one standpoint in the postmodern understanding. It concludes by explaining how Marx’s thinking prefigured critical realism and what made Marx’s theorizing of capital both an economic science and intersubjective foundation for broad opposition to dismount the rule of capitalism.
By the 1950s, positivism was accepted as the scientific method. It claimed a unified methodology for all natural and social sciences. Its prescription for science was to produce general theories of causal relations in the world. These relations were claimed to be constant conjunctions or event regularities captured by observation. From the 1960s, however, challenges to positivism began to mount. On the one hand, positivist reliance upon empirical evidence to verify general laws was questioned over the possibility of future contrary observations. On the other hand, its deductive analytic was apprehended not simply as a tool of theory but shaping the very observation relied upon to confirm general theory in the first place. Observation, so it was asseverated, is always “theory laden”.
Defending positivism against such attacks was the work of Karl Popper. Popper asserted that science never begins with observation not ensconced in some “frame of theory”. The job of science is, then, to work through such “frames” to impose regularities upon its subject matter. Where observation comes into play is in theory testing. What testing strives for is “falsification” of general theories. Hence, for Popper, science works with “conjectures” and “refutations” (Blaikie 2007: 21, 114-5). Popper, however, never clarified the relationship between empirical evidence and theory choice. Norris (1996: 157), therefore, argued that Popper depended “on under-specified criteria of what should count as decisive falsification (or as grounds for rejecting some candidate hypothesis) in any given case. In other words, the methodology of ‘conjecture and refutation’…amounts to just a minor inverted variation on the positivist or logical-empiricist theme”. Further, Poppers’ view of science proceeding through processes of “conjectures and refutations” ended up blurring the hard line positivists had initially sought to establish between their science and metaphysics.
Such uncertainties over empirical evidence in adjudicating among rival theories soon opened the floodgates in the philosophy of science to irrealism. “Because massive underdetermination of belief by ‘objective’ factors came to seem omnipresent”, declares Kitcher (1993: 7), “there opened up a vacuum into which social explanations of scientific behavior could be inserted. Instead of an ordered abode of reason, science came to figure as the smoke-filled back rooms of political brokering”. In this vein, currents of conventionalism questioned realist claims of a “fit” between scientific theories and goings on in a mind independent world. Rather, defense of theories depended upon the predominant belief systems over what constitutes science and truth. Scientific theory, as such, according to Thomas Kuhn, progressed through “paradigms” that ushered in new worlds of beliefs and practices. Such paradigms were deemed “incommensurable” in the sense of each creating a “different world” that cannot be compared to another or assessed from a “standpoint” beyond its paradigm. As put by Harre (2000: 238): “The transition from one paradigm to another is driven by all sorts of forces, social, personal, and intellectual. There is no paradigm completely independent of these forces. A paradigm is both the possession of a scientific community and its defining characteristic”.
Postmodernism (Eagleton 1996 offers an exhaustive treatment of the ideology and its players), in all its currents, would then extrapolate this view to extremes with its claim that there is no “real”, mind independent world from which we can take soundings to assess the adequacy or truth of our thought schemes in relation to their subject matters. There are only those paradigms, schemes, discourses, and so forth, each generating their own world. “The world no more constrains scientific narratives as to their authenticity than the printed text or novel constrains the readings of those who engage it” (Harre 2000: 236).
Postmodernism, Identity and Standpoint Epistemology
As postmodernism swept through the academy in the 1980s and 90s, new social movement actors disturbed by failures of “meta” emancipatory narratives like socialism to address multifarious oppressions such as those based upon race, gender and so forth thirstily imbibed it. Where the enchantment with postmodernism resided was in its ultimate liberating of epistemological or knowledge claims from both the universal formula for knowing imposed by positivism and the requirement based upon that of theory as the “mirror” for observed event regularities in a mind independent world. It was precisely the scientific method as such, the new movements believed, that was wielded as a truncheon over the oppressed in society to “silence” those “voices” seeking to cast off their oppressive yokes (Sanbonmatsu 2004: 63-4). Succinctly summarized by Sanbonmatsu (2004: 117), if oppression “is constituted in and through knowledge regimes, then the ‘solution’ logically must lie in helping ‘subjugated knowledges’ bubble up from the obscure depths of modernity”. With conventionalism already making the case for truth being a matter of scientific communities and their epistemic beliefs, postmodernism supported the further “situatedness” of truth in the “standpoints” of oppositional movement identities and their practices (Toole 2021: 341-2).
As explained by Hekman (1997: 347), though “standpoint theory” springs from feminist scholarship, its initial development imbibed elements of what was believed to constitute Marxism in seeking to locate a specifically “women’s standpoint” in the “reality” of their world. Marxism, in this conventional account, also sought to anchor its analysis in “a unique entry point” which captured the reality of class oppression (Wolff and Resnick 2012: 41). What concerned Hekman (1997: 349) was the question of how to preserve the “political force” of the feminist standpoint while recognizing the contributions of postmodernism to twentieth-century philosophy which had supposedly discredited the positivist hangover of knowledge being “grounded” in a “preconceptual reality”. Where Hekman maintains feminist standpoint theory can be strengthened stems from the acceptance of it as itself “a socially constructed discursive formation”. One, to be sure, that is counterhegemonic and destabilizing of hegemonic masculinist discourse, but a discourse nevertheless. “Throughout the second half of the twentieth-century a paradigm shift has been underway in epistemology, a movement from a subject-centered conception of truth to a conception of truth as situated, perspectival and discursive…feminism…continues to be at he forefront of this paradigm” (Hekman 1997: 355-6).
Today, then, it is such “standpoint epistemology” upon which identity politics is ultimately based. Standpoint epistemology entails three specific conditions: First is that knowledge is not simply a matter of one’s social location but of their consciousness being “raised” through the experience of struggles amongst those “similarly situated”. Second, is that of “epistemic privilege” which draws knowledge “from positions of powerlessness or marginalization”. Third is that standpoint knowledge is advanced through “interactions” among those engaged in “consciousness raising” as they develop the epistemological resources necessary to combat the forms of oppression they face (Toole 2021: 342-4). As concluded by Toole (2021: 345), epistemology in the mode of the positivist scientific method gave precedence to objective factors purportedly grounded in “reality”. This notion of objective knowledge as a “view from nowhere” is contrasted with standpoint epistemology which constitutes a “view from somewhere”. It seeks to reground objectivity upon the impact of situatedness and perspective on knowledge.
Reclaiming Reality
Spearheading a corrective to the above morass, critical realism philosophy of science argues that the discontents of positivism as the scientific method along with the flight to irrealism positivism’s implosion impelled share three hugely problematic understandings of knowledge and epistemology (Bhaskar 2008). First is the assumption that in answering the epistemological question of how we know something the ontological question of the object of knowledge or what there is to be known is simultaneously answered. Second, it is only predicated upon a grasp of a particular object of knowledge and its ontological properties that it is possible to specify the kind of science and epistemological resources that its apprehension entails. Third is that the observation of constant conjunctions positivism claimed to build general theory or covering laws upon, are always only surface manifestations of causally efficacious deep mechanisms and it is identifying and theorizing the latter upon which the intelligibility of science is necessarily rooted. Theory, in other words, is not simply the conceptual “mirror” or representation of observed event regularities. If there is any correspondence that exists between theory and goings on in a mind independent world it is that “between the causal structure of those objects or events to be explained and the logical structure of the theory that purports to explain them” (Norris 1997: 102).
In short, while postmodernism and its imbibing by identity politics actors has served to alert us to often hidden structures of power and multiplicities of oppression, it carries over two immensely disabling aspects of positivism. The first is the eliding of ontology or the referent in questions of knowledge, its formation and cognitive resources necessary for producing knowledge of this or that object of thought. After all, as Bhaskar (1986: 42-3) quips, the excitement over discourse obviating the need to take soundings from a world beyond thought to support its truth claims forgets the simple adage that there always has to be something to talk about. Hence, even if the talk is about another discourse, and so on, “an ontological cheque will sooner or later need to be presented and cashed”. The second is that for all its enthralling discourse on appreciation of difference, it prescribes a methodological and epistemological monism (redolent of the positivism it decries) – standpoint epistemology – for all knowledge endeavors irrespective of the “what” of knowledge. It is thus no accident that it is precisely during those decades in which postmodernism swept through the academy and then society (the latter in “fast” philosophical form) slicing and dicing opposition into “situationist”, “perspectivist” protest movements, that neoliberalism and the transformations of capitalism euphemized as globalization and financialization sanctioned by neoliberal ideology commenced their ravaging of humanity and the planet.
Re-Enter Marx and Transformatory Struggle
It is so very unfortunate that Marxism, as construed through both its “orthodox” and “Western” variants, as an overarching theory of historical trajectory, proved powerless to counter the virus of postmodernism. As argued at length elsewhere (Westra 2021), this is because in its above rendition it also elided ontological questions of the what of knowledge and veered precariously close to a form of standpoint epistemology. That is, while Marxism in a broad sense refers to that body of thought tracing its lineage to Marx, contrary to popular Marxology, there is no singular “Marxism” with “Marx’s method” or “standpoint” (of social class, for example) that can be applied to all phenomena regardless of their discrete ontological structure. To advance such a position that Marx, while a genius to be sure, evolved a “method” or epistemology from his own “perspective” or “experience”, to deal with the phenomenal world and all its furniture, amounts to the most base idealism. It would also reduce Marx’s thought to simply one “voice” within a cacophony of ideologies.
Rather, “Marxism” in Marx’s own hands is composed of several research agendas for different subject matters ranging from jurisprudence through socialism and political economy. Prominent among these is Marx’s overarching approach to human history in toto or historical materialism, treated in pithy fashion over a few paragraphs in the (in)famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Then there is Marx’s economic theory in Capital. Why Marx referred to his logical analysis of the capitalist mode of production in Capital as a new science stems from the fact that it is only capitalism that, for the first time in human history, reveals its economic life “transparently” as a separate sphere of society, “disembedded” from the gamut of social practices with which it had been enmeshed and indistinguishable from in past societies. Prefiguring critical realism philosophy of science, Marx maintained that the causal or generative force seemingly levitating economic life in the capitalist era from its social moorings, thus rendering it amenable as a separate sphere of society to systematic study, springs from the unique ontology of capital as an object of study in the social world. This ontological uniqueness is the tendency of capital to reify a subset of human social relations – the relations of production in the capitalist era – converting these into impersonal relations among things (Marx 1977: 165). What warranted the designation of new science to Marx’s theorizing of the capitalist mode of production in Capital is the fact that with a specific ensemble of epistemological or cognitive resources, Marx was able to follow or “copy”, through disciplined thought, the causal force of capitalist reification to logically demonstrate in theory how capital is able to subsume economic life in the capitalist era and wield it as a vehicle of value augmentation while reproducing a human society as its byproduct.
Because Marx constructed his theory of the capitalist mode of production predicated upon the causal force of abstraction or reification of its unique ontological object of study, the objectivity of his theory in Capital is not a “view from nowhere” but a material reality assisted “view from somewhere”. This “somewhere”, however, is not Marx’s “standpoint” or subject-centered conception” within the social world but that of the objective causal force of capital as the constant of all really existing historical capitalisms that, wherever they spawn, produce alien, upside down societies which reproduce human material existence as a byproduct of value augmentation or profit making. Marx’s theory in Capital meets the most robust test of science given the correspondence it effects “between the causal structure of capital and the logical structure of the theory that explains or defines it”. It is from Marx’s theorizing in Capital that the project of Marxian political economy, which studies major phases and varieties of capitalism germinates. As well, Marx’s Capital gives scientific foundation to studying the physiognomy of economic life in past and future historical societies in historical materialism. Yet, when concepts such as class are applied in concrete, historical analysis of capitalism or, potentially, in exploration of material life in precapitalist societies, this cannot be done in the logically determinist fashion as per their grounding in economic theorizing of capital. Further, in showing how capital as an upside down economy is able to subsume the metabolic interchange between human beings and nature to wield a human society for its abstract purpose, Marx anchors the possibility of socialism as a society where free associations of free human beings wield that metabolic interchange to reproduce their economic life for concrete, “right side up” purposes of human flourishing. Finally, because Marx exposes what the constant of capitalism is and does across all historical variations of capitalism he provides an objective or intersubjective grounding for social struggles to dismount capital and eradicate its oppressive residues from the earth.
References
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