Further musings upon ‘Marx’s Method’ and ‘Science’

The November 2013 edition of Socialist Standard, in the feature on pages 10-12, titled ‘Karl Marx: Anthropologist’, refers to the book Karl Marx, Anthropologist, by Thomas C. Patterson (2009). The quote below is taken from pages 93-4 of that book.

[analogy]

The method he developed was analogous to peeling an onion layer by layer, revealing its internal structure with each successive layer until reaching its core, and then reassembling the whole.

[technique]

The technique involved looking behind and beneath superficial appearances, moving from the perceived concrete appearances by a process of abstraction (breaking the whole into mental constructs) and then back to the newly appreciated concrete whole with a greater understanding both of the unity of parts and whole and of the inner dynamics, structure, and contradictions of that totality.

Marx’s ongoing historical analyses of particular societies underwrote a general conception of society which provided both a framework and a set of questions for further detailed, empirical sociohistorical studies of those and other historically specific societies. My goal in this section is to consider the conceptual underpinnings of his dialectical anthropology and some of its implications for anthropology today.

[my bold, subtitles and breaks]

Given our recent discussions on scientific method, Pannekoek and dialectics, I thought that this quote could provide a starting point for some further discussion about Marx’s method, that is, ‘the conceptual underpinnings’ referred to by Patterson.

[analogy]

I have some questions about Patterson’s analogy for Marx’s method. Who or what decides what constitutes the ‘onion’ to be revealed? Is the onion a given, which presents itself for examination? If so, wouldn’t this constitute ‘induction’? Again, who or what decides what constitutes each ‘layer’, or ‘its core’? Are these self-evident? Does the ‘onion’ thrust itself forward and actively disrobe itself of ‘layers’ and expose its ‘core’ for the passive observer? If so, this would constitute an analogy which would fit nicely with 19^th century positivist science.

But… ‘peeling’ is a conscious activity (the onion doesn’t peel itself), which suggests that the ‘peeler’ is an independent part of this process. That is, both an active ‘peeler’ and an ‘onion’ to be peeled are required. A ‘peeler’ can’t pretend an ‘onion’ exists, but without an active peeler the ‘onion’ remains both unidentified and intact. The ‘onion’ must be selected by the ‘peeler’, for their further active attentions. If this interpretation of the analogy is accepted, then it would be at odds with Engels’ philosophy of science, because within nature only human consciousness and activity can fulfil the role of ‘peeler’. This stance destroys the positivist notion of ‘Truth’ and ‘Objective Knowledge’. The ‘peeler’ plays an inescapably creative and selective part in the process of gaining ‘knowledge’ of ‘onions’. ‘Scientific Knowledge’ would always be social, and any notion of ‘objectivity’ would have to take the form of ‘Social Objectivity’. The knowledge of ‘onions’ is a social construct.

[technique]

Perhaps we can answer our conundrum about Patterson’s analogy by looking at the ‘technique’, which he argues that Marx employed. Patterson says that Marx starts from the “perceived concrete appearances”. Since ‘perception’ is always social, and even our senses (which are a part of our perceptual system, together with our mind) are socially developed (and not fixed, individual, biological attributes), this starting point for the process of human understanding must be the society within which the perceivers are living. This means that the starting point, in Patterson’s analogy, is not the perceived ‘onion’, but the social theory which the perceivers employ to determine the extent and content of the ‘onion’ to be ‘peeled’. Patterson regards this as Marx’s “process of abstraction (breaking the whole into mental constructs)”. The first move in this ‘process of abstraction’ must be the determination by humans of the meaning of the ‘onion’, and what counts as its layers, core, and all their relationships. The ‘onion’ is then examined, to confirm the preceding theoretical framework. This ‘peeling’ of the ‘onion’ must follow the ‘process of abstraction’, to give a detailed “newly appreciated concrete whole”.

To me, this process is the meaning of ‘the unity of theory and practice’, or ‘praxis’. It is ‘praxis’ that gives “greater understanding both of the unity of parts and whole and of the inner dynamics, structure, and contradictions of that totality”. Practice is essential to produce understanding, but that practice is necessarily preceded by theorisation.

Furthermore, I’d argue that the method of 19^th century positivism, empiricism and induction, which insists that the starting point is the ‘onion’ which itself determines its being (a being which humans can access with a neutral, non-social, non-political scientific method), does not correspond to Marx’s method. In fact, Marx’s scientific method corresponds more closely to the ideas of modern 20^th century philosophers of science, like Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend and Lakatos, who all stressed the active part played by humans in producing scientific knowledge. This viewpoint has also been obscured by Engels’ reversion, from the insights of Marx (the trained philosopher) in the 1840s, to a ‘materialism’ similar to that which existed before Marx wrote, and which was the basis of a 19^th century ‘science’ which so influenced Engels (the amateur philosopher).