Why we need socialist theory

MOST PEOPLE realize that to accomplish anything in sciences like physics or chemistry, scientists need theory--explanations about why and how things happen that are not apparent through immediate observation.

Scientists couldn't, for example, learn from direct observation that animals have a genetic code on their cells that determines their general physical makeup.

It also appears that the planets and stars revolve around the earth. But on further observation, it was discovered that the earth revolved around the sun inside a solar system that revolved around the center of the galaxy, and so on.

In other words, scientific theory helps to get beneath the surface appearance of things to understand the underlying laws that govern behavior. Without this knowledge, it would be impossible to develop new technologies.

So much for science. But what about human society? Do we need a theory of society and its history? Karl Marx once wrote, "The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it."

One way to interpret this statement is as an argument against theory--that we don't need ideas as much as simply getting out there and "fighting for what's right." Yet Marx spent a great deal of time interpreting the world--in order to change it.

The ruling class on the other hand--the richest 1 percent of the society that own the banks, the factories, the hospitals, the media and so on--doesn't want society to change. They need science, to be sure--physics and chemistry, biology and computer science--in order to figure out ways to produce things cheaper and faster.

They need science to provide the most modern military technology in order to protect their wealth from each other and from us. But the last thing those who rule society need is a scientific understand of society.

On the contrary, what they need is not science but what Marx called "ideology"--ideas meant not to explain the workings of society (and therefore how to change it) but to either obscure or even justify as necessary the inequalities of capitalism.

Marx challenged the economists of his time, saying that for them, it wasn't a question of whether "this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient and inexpedient, politically dangerous or not."

"In place of disinterested inquirers," he concluded, "there were hired prizefighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetics."

One of the things that "hired prizefighter"--such as governmental and private think-tanks, professors and economics and sociology at prestigious universities and so on--do is present society as if it is a static, unchanging thing.

CAPITALISM CORRESPONDS to human nature, goes the argument. If it's true, then change is impossible. Never mind the fact that for most of human history, people lived in hunting and gathering societies where goods were procured and shared in common.

Workers on the other hand--the vast majority of whom are exploited in our society for the profits of a minority--have an interest in understanding how society really works. They have an interest in looking beneath the surface appearance in our society--the appearance, for example, that "one person, one vote" gives us all an equal say in what goes on in the political system.

What Marx called "the ruling ideas of society"--racist ideas, sexist ideas, anti-immigrant ideas, the idea that scarcity is the cause of poverty--are widely disseminated precisely in order to try to keep workers divided and to obscure the real workings of the system.

But if scientists have their laboratories, for workers, the laboratory is society itself. Primarily through class struggle--and the accumulated lessons and generalizations drawn from that struggle--workers learn the true nature of the system and how to transform it.

Insofar, Marx argued, as a real critical understanding of society represents a class, "it can only represent the class whose vocation in history is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes--the proletariat."

First published in the October 22, 1999, issue of Socialist Worker.