It is hard to see how Marx loved knowledge. — Lionino

He claimed his work was scientific.

I see Capital as an attempt at a scientific description of wealth generation for the purposes of the workers to be able to organize and effect change for the better from this description: if a worker believes that wealth is generated by individual hard work and that the firm will reward them for their individual hard work then they'll engage in the firm in an individualistic manner. If a worker understands that the firm is there to exploit labor-power, no matter where you land in the firm, then the worker will engage in the firm in a collective manner.

Some individuals really are so good that they can "shoot past" the rest, though I think it's a bit selfish. But for the rest of us his description points out a knowledge he loved, but a knowledge from the standpoint of the bronze souled people.

He claimed his work was scientific. — Moliere

Even worse, he claimed his branch of socialism™ was scientific. The same hubris we see in post-modern leftists: "Dead old men? Hng, who cares? We in the 21st century know better!"

He claimed his work was scientific. — Moliere

According to modern standards, it means that Marx would have experimentally tested his hypothesis.

It is thanks to people like Marx that Karl Popper finally investigated what the term "scientific" means:

https://staff.washington.edu/lynnhank/Popper-1.pdf

Science as Falsification

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appear to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred.

It is the investigation into why Marx' work is not scientific that led to the modern epistemology of science. Marx' work is one of the canonical counterexamples.

"it's not philosophical and it's not scientific" as if the Politea was. These are nonsense complaints. The vision of Marx was about how to arrive at what he thought was a just society growing up in a time where capitalism caused a lot of problems locally. It fails as a economic theory because all economic theories fail but the crux of his work is how to ensure the benefits of economic activity doesn't concentrate in the hands of the few, who have no moral claim to it merely as provider of capital (which they often only accumulate through injustice, inheritance or dumb luck).

the crux of his work is how to ensure the benefits of economic activity doesn't concentrate in the hands of the few — Benkei

These benefits predictable started concentrating in the hands of the apparatchiks of the Soviet Union.

Political power always concentrates in the hands of the few in power, i.e. the ruling mafia. Political power always translates into accumulating economic benefits for the ones who have it. All excess income and excess wealth will end up exactly there. So, Marx successfully replaced the bourgeoisie by the apparatchiks of the communist State.

The best system to avoid concentration of power is democracy. So we should abolish autocratic systems of governance in every area of human life, including the economy.

The best system to avoid concentration of power is democracy. — Benkei

A democracy still has a ruling oligarchy. Political power still concentrates in the hands of the few in power. The ruling mafia still ends up with the excess income and excess wealth.

It is not possible to change the inevitable geometry of society. A society has a top where the political power is located. A society has a bottom with a restless, gullible, and eminently manipulable populace.

It is an illusion to believe that the voting circus will make any difference to that.

I am not interested in improving anything.
I simply go where I am treated best.
I vote with my feet instead.

I do not choose to stay in any of the so-called democracies of the West. In all practical terms, everything else turns out to work much better for me. Vietnam is supposedly an autocracy. Well, I would choose Vietnam any day over any of the so-called democracies in the EU or North America.

Seriously, I do not care if a country is an "autocracy" or not. If I get treated better over there, then that country is better for me. There are currently around 40+ million digital nomads, and growing, and pretty much none of us choose to stay in the so-called western democracies.

OK, it's all about you in which case I don't really care.

The vision of Marx was about how to arrive at what he thought was a just society growing up in a time where capitalism caused a lot of problems locally. It fails as a economic theory because all economic theories fail but the crux of his work is how to ensure the benefits of economic activity doesn't concentrate in the hands of the few, who have no moral claim to it merely as provider of capital (which they often only accumulate through injustice, inheritance or dumb luck). — Benkei

The best system to avoid concentration of power is democracy. So we should abolish autocratic systems of governance in every area of human life, including the economy. — Benkei

Yeah -- at present I think that's so. The economy ought have more democratic means of making decisions to include all stakeholders in a negotiation.

I'm conflicted because I could be considered a post-modern leftist but I like all the old dead white men :D (also, while I read the PoMo's, I think I do so from the old perspective of simply reading the texts critically)

Marx definitely claimed science for his socialism, but I don't think it's a "worse" thing because he was in that era when it looked like science could solve it all: He's 1 generation after August Comte, and Hegel's philosophy emphasizes itself as scientific -- it's just in what we'd call the "old" way of saying "scientific" because it's an organized body of knowledge, whereas Marx seems to straddle these two ways of thinking of science. Sometimes it's an organized body of knowledge, and sometimes it predicts the stages of history ala August Comte's Positivism.

I very much disagree with the "stages" view as mistaken historiography/sociology -- though think there's something about the industrial revolution and the rise of the shop-owners over the Lords and church that is hard to understand, where Marx gives a good explanation for it: they acquired means of producing wealth greater than the lords and formed coalitions to increase their influence, as humans do when they can, and things proceeded from there.

But I think Capital describes capitalism from the perspective of the worker in the most scientific manner thus far at least. Economics after Marx shy away from production-centric theories of value, while explicitly ignoring all the things Marx says about exchange in order to focus in on what those economists care about: Markets, firms, profits, etc.

There's also the fact that Marx and Engels were using the term Wissenschaft, which is broader than science as commonly understood in English today. They meant that their socialism was systematic, not merely Utopian. They certainly didn't mean to equate it with empirical sciences.

Although you're probably right, @Moliere, that they were attempting to reach beyond that older sense of science to something modern.

The economy ought have more democratic means of making decisions to include all stakeholders in a negotiation. — Moliere

The term "democracy", "rule by the people", is in and of itself already nonsensical because in reality a country is always "ruled by the oligarchy".

This is a matter of simple geometry.

There is always a hierarchical top to society where all the political power accumulates, and therefore, also pretty much all the wealth.

Efforts to make the populace believe in the always-fake democracy are very bad for the people that they are supposed to serve. You are just bamboozling them a bit more.

It is simply not possible to prevent the concentration of political power and therefore of wealth.

There's also the fact that Marx and Engels were using the term Wissenschaft, which is broader than science as commonly understood in English today. They meant that their socialism was systematic, not merely Utopian. They certainly didn't mean to equate it with empirical sciences.

Although you're probably right, Moliere, that they were attempting to reach beyond that older sense of science to something modern. — Jamal

In the Penguin edition of Capital, v1 introduction (page 12 for the viewers at home):

I. THE PURPOSE OF CAPITAL
In Capital Marx's fundamental aim was to lay bare the laws of motion which govern the origins, the rise, the development, the decline and the disappearance of a given social form of economic
organization: the capitalist mode of production.

He was not seeking universal economic laws of organization. Indeed, one of the essential theses of Capital is that no such law exists.

For Marx, there are no economic laws valid for each and every basically different form of society (aside from trivialities like the formula which points out that no society can consume more than it produces without reducing its stock of wealth - whether the natural fertility of the land, the total population, the mass of means of production, or several of these). Each specific social form of economic organization has its own specific economic laws. Capital limits itself to examining those which govern the capitalist mode of production.

Capital is therefore not' pure' economic theory at all. For Marx, ' pure' economic theory, that is economic theory which abstracts from a specific social structure, is impossible. It would be similar
to ' pure' anatomy, abstracted from the specific species which is to be examined.

Going back to something to remind myself here -- I've seen Capital, v1 described as Newton's laws of motion for capitalism before, and the quote here gives a limitation to that expression in that Newton was aiming to be universal, but Marx's description is limited to Capitalism.

But still law-like, in that new scientific sense, like Newton. (I generally consider the currently accepted sciences as the new scientific sense: The scholastics had an organized body of knowledge, but Descartes wanted to talk about The World, which Newton's text is similar in that regard of trying to "explain it all")

And as later became clear it only describes the trajectory of Western capitalism.

Yeah.