The Scientificity of Marxian Economic Theory and the Spuriousness of Bourgeois Natural Science of Society

Abstract

Today, the prevailing view is that “bourgeois” economics has attained paradigmatic legitimacy by being “naturalized”, i.e., by pretending to have become an “objective science”, however imperfect, in the same sense as a natural science is believed to be. That is quite different from what I have been claiming here so far, namely that Marxian economics (and more precisely its Unoist variation) represents an objective knowledge of capitalism (or the “capitalist mode of production”, more precisely) as the base (or “substructure”) of modern society, which is a historical society. It is, therefore, quite important to clarify and to stress the point here again that objectivity in the natural sciences is quite different from that in a social science, such as economics. If, indeed, one tries carelessly to import the idea of objectivity in the natural sciences into the social-scientific discipline of economics, one is bound to be caught in a “contradiction” even in the formal-logical sense. For, that would mean to assert, in effect, that capitalism is as immutable as nature is. In that case, capitalism could not possibly be a historical society, a society that comes into being at one point in history and departs from it at another. I have tried to show, however, that to regard capitalism as immutable as “nature” would amount to (or would be equivalent to) believing that it is God’s design, and that, with that sort of presupposition, economics is bound to degenerate into a religious dogma, and cannot remain a science in pursuit of any objective knowledge pertaining to ourselves and our deeds as human beings. Only the most reactionary brand of the bourgeois-modern school of economics, which glorifies capitalism as an end in itself, can uphold such a monstrously unreasonable idea without any scruple.