Is Marxism a science?

[Dermezel]

Layra-chan

China is in fact a terrible example of "centrally government-run capitalism". Where it is capitalistic, it is not centrally run, and where it is centrally run, it is not capitalism,

That isn't correct. All large Chinese banks are state run, the government holds the majority seats of any board of directors of any large company (even if it does not own the majority of assets) and there are over 115,000 state owned enterprises. This does not even include other areas of government control, such as social programs or environmental initiatives.

[Dermezel]

Golden Dysprosium

Dermezel

Layra-chan

As such, theories on economics have to make a large number of assumptions

Not Marxism. You are thinking the Austrian School which admits to placing axioms/assumptions over observational data.
Marxism is based directly on observable, testable, data. It makes predictions, and those predictions can be directly tested against empirical evidence.

Because clearly, Marxism has aaaaalllll the answers. rolleyes
The fact that you're trying to push Marxism as empirical in what appears to be an attempt to convert us all to (quel suprise) Marxism is pretty lame. And why did you pull up homeless stats?
As for economics and other social sciences, Mr. Feynman said it best:

Richard Feynman

Because of the success of science, there is, I think, a kind of pseudoscience. Social science is an example of a science which is not a science; they don't do things scientifically, they follow the forms—or you gather data, you do so-and-so and so forth but they don't get any laws, they haven't found out anything.

Marx was the head of the drinking club at his University, Feyman is a Nobel Prize winner who worked on the Manhattan Project.

Calling all of social science a pseudoscience represents an embarrassment of riches. You are dismissing:

Quote:

# 2.1 Anthropology
# 2.2 Economics
# 2.3 Education
# 2.4 Geography
# 2.5 History
# 2.6 Law
# 2.7 Linguistics
# 2.8 Political science

* 2.8.1 Public Administration

# 2.9 Psychology
# 2.10 Social Work
# 2.11 Sociology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_sciences

Now to take just two examples, I would like to know why say, anthropology and psychology are not considered sciences.

[Morberticus]

Dermezel

Calling all of social science a pseudoscience represents an embarrassment of riches.

wut?

[Golden Dysprosium]

Dermezel

Calling all of social science a pseudoscience represents an embarrassment of riches. You are dismissing:

Quote:

# 2.1 Anthropology
# 2.2 Economics
# 2.3 Education
# 2.4 Geography
# 2.5 History
# 2.6 Law
# 2.7 Linguistics
# 2.8 Political science
* 2.8.1 Public Administration
# 2.9 Psychology
# 2.10 Social Work
# 2.11 Sociology

2.1 and 2.9 are the only ones there that qualify under "hard science". Now by the same token I ask you to explain why the others (2.2-2.8, 2.10, 2.11) are considered to be what we call "science".

[VorpalNeko]

Morberticus

Dermezel

Calling all of social science a pseudoscience represents an embarrassment of riches.

wut?

Down with the oppressive bourgeoisie labelers! Social sciences unite!

---

Dermezel

And last, countries which went from government control of the means of production to capitalism, such as the USSR, experienced severe economic collapse and are now more susceptible to periodic recession.

That's a classic post hoc fallacy. When your economy collapses, then you sell government property to try to prop it up, thus privatizing and opening the door to capitalism, it makes no sense at all to say that the move to capitalism caused the collapse. In the 80s, the USSR was already dead. It just took a bit longer for the stink and rot to seep through to the surface.

Dermezel

Given the continued presence of current economic crashes in the era where government's will heavily regulate capitalism I would argue that the data shows Marx was more correct then Keynes.

You mean those economic woes we're having that were result of drinking deregulation Kool-Aid? Do you have some Marxist account of why in the US, the crash is a few markets took out the entire economy? Perhaps without the Reaganomics in the 70s via its injection of a vast number of loopholes pertaining to derivative trading? Maybe without the Commodity Futures Trading Commission being gutted in regards to regulation on futures vs forwards in 1990, without Clinton overseeing an entire era of deregulation, and without CFTC creating an almost completely unregulated derivative trading environment in 2000?

Golden Dysprosium

2.1 and 2.9 are the only ones there that qualify under "hard science". Now by the same token I ask you to explain why the others (2.2-2.8, 2.10, 2.11) are considered to be what we call "science".

I wouldn't call 2.9 "hard" either. Dermezel is simultaneously correct and partly missing the point. He is correct because all he needs is at least one thing on that list to be some kind of science, hard or soft. Feynman had specific kind of purported science in mind, and he does go on to elaborate, but so what? At best, all it would mean that perhaps Feynman should have put some more qualifications on his wording. That's not exactly interesting.

A more pertinent issue would be something like this: under what circumstances in the domain it claims for itself could Marxism be potentially falsified? Because if it can cope with any outcome from its domain, it's not falsifiable, and therefore not science. If it is falsifiable, then it could potentially be a science, although just how much so depends in part on how specific its predictions are.

[Dermezel]

Morberticus

Dermezel

Calling all of social science a pseudoscience represents an embarrassment of riches.

wut?

I took the phrase from Dr. Michael Shermer with respect to the claim that there are no transitional forms in evolution. Shermer called the claim an "embarrassment of riches" because there are literally hundreds of fossils of transitional forms.

[Dermezel]

VorpalNeko

That's a classic post hoc fallacy. When your economy collapses, then you sell government property to try to prop it up, thus privatizing and opening the door to capitalism, it makes no sense at all to say that the move to capitalism caused the collapse. In the 80s, the USSR was already dead. It just took a bit longer for the stink and rot to seep through to the surface.

Science is ultimately based on empirical observations. The fact is I do not consider the fall of the USSR to be post hoc because the reason for the collapse can be traced to specific capitalist reforms, which lead to hot money and the selling off of key Russian resources at greatly reduced value, as well as the partitioning of industries.

Simply put privatization lead directly to asset-stripping and capital flight. To quote Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz:

Quote:

Stiglitz: Put yourself in the shoes of one of these oligarchs who has been given a gift of $10 billion. Russia is in a deep depression. Nobody's investing. There is a widespread political consensus that the way you got your wealth is illegitimate. Through political connections, you got the government to give you a huge oil field. You sell oil. What do you do with the revenue? You have a choice: You can invest it in the booming New York stock market, or you can invest it in Russia, which is in a depression. If you invest it in Russia, you are risking that eventually there will be a new government that says, "Yeltsin was a crook, and you got the money in an illegitimate way." And the IMF invites you to take the money out, because free capital markets are the way of the future. Then, to make your life even easier, in August 1998 the IMF comes in and says we'll give you $5 billion or $6 billion to up the exchange rates so you can get more for your rubles to take over to Cyprus in the next day or so.

Quote:

Rather than providing incentives for wealth creation, privatization provided incentives for asset-stripping, with huge movements of capital abroad--$2 billion to $3 billion a month. Policies seemed almost deliberately designed to suppress new enterprise and job creation. The excessive focus on macrostabilization led to interest rates of 20, 30, 40, 250 percent. There is little domestic or foreign investment except in natural resources. How many Americans will start a business if the interest rates are 150 percent?

This was not an inevitable collapse but a direct consequence of privatization and market liberalization.

VorpalNeko

Do you have some Marxist account of why in the US, the crash is a few markets took out the entire economy?

Very much so. In fact Marx has a very explicit quote as to why a credit crisis (which is exactly what the US faces) occurs under capitalism:

Quote:

As long as the reproduction process is continuous and, therefore, the return flow assured, this credit exists and expands, and its expansion is based upon the expansion of the reproduction process itself. As soon as a stoppage takes place, as a result of delayed returns, glutted markets, or fallen prices, a superabundance of industrial capital becomes available, but in a form in which it cannot perform its junctions. Huge quantities of commodity-capital, but unsaleable. Huge quantities of fixed capital, but largely idle due to stagnant reproduction. Credit is contracted 1) because this capital is idle, i.e., blocked in one of its phases of reproduction because it cannot complete its metamorphosis; 2) because confidence in the continuity of the reproduction process has been shaken; 3) because the demand for this commercial credit diminishes. The spinner, who curtails his production and has a large quantity of unsold yarn in stock, does not need to buy any cotton on credit; the merchant does not need to buy any commodities on credit because he has more than enough of them.

Hence, if there is a disturbance in this expansion or even in the normal flow of the reproduction process, credit also becomes scarce; it is more difficult to obtain commodities on credit. However, the demand for cash payment and the caution observed toward sales on credit are particularly characteristic of the phase of the industrial cycle following a crash. During the crisis itself, since everyone has products to sell, cannot sell them, and yet must sell them in order to meet payments, it is not the mass of idle and investment-seeking capital, but rather the mass of capital impeded in its reproduction process, that is greatest just when the shortage of credit is most acute (and therefore the rate of discount highest for banker’s credit). The capital already invested is then, indeed, idle in large quantities because the reproduction process is stagnant. Factories are closed, raw materials accumulate, finished products flood the market as commodities. Nothing is more erroneous, therefore, than to blame a scarcity of productive capital for such a condition. It is precisely at such times that there is a superabundance of productive capital, partly in relation to the normal, but temporarily reduced scale of reproduction, and partly in relation to the paralysed consumption.

Capital Vol. III Part V
Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest-Bearing Capital
Chapter 30. Money-Capital and Real Capital.

I'm glad you asked this because this is an empirical prediction that can be tested directly against the facts. Consider for example how our trade deficit is fed directly by our credit system. In fact America's Total Debt Report (which measures public and private debt ) shows that our credit system has put us tens of trillions of dollars in debt. The underlying cause is trade deficit, the visible cause is a credit crunch. This is just as Marx would have predicted.

VorpalNeko

Perhaps without the Reaganomics in the 70s via its injection of a vast number of loopholes pertaining to derivative trading? Maybe without the Commodity Futures Trading Commission being gutted in regards to regulation on futures vs forwards in 1990, without Clinton overseeing an entire era of deregulation, and without CFTC creating an almost completely unregulated derivative trading environment in 2000?

Marx notes specific condition under which credit contracts: "Credit is contracted 1) because this capital is idle, i.e., blocked in one of its phases of reproduction because it cannot complete its metamorphosis; 2) because confidence in the continuity of the reproduction process has been shaken; 3) because the demand for this commercial credit diminishes."

Regulations can of course help with this matter, but that of course is a move to a more socialist/government controlled economy.

VorpalNeko

A more pertinent issue would be something like this: under what circumstances in the domain it claims for itself could Marxism be potentially falsified? Because if it can cope with any outcome from its domain, it's not falsifiable, and therefore not science. If it is falsifiable, then it could potentially be a science, although just how much so depends in part on how specific its predictions are.

Karl Popper (the founder of the falsification principle in science) said the same thing about natural selection, initially rejecting it as untestable because it was, in his opinion a tautology:

Quote:

The argument regarding "survival of the fittest" is that the only way one can usually tell who the fittest are is to see who survives. But then survival of the fittest becomes "almost a tautology" and hence untestable (Popper, 1972, p. 69; 1963a, p. 964).

- page 11 -

I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme—a possible framework for testable scientific theories. [Popper, 1976, p. 168]

It is clear that here Darwinism means natural selection, not evolution. Popper states this explicitly earlier in the same work:

. . . because I intend to argue that the theory of natural selection is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme; . . . [Popper, 1976, p. 151]

There are two points to be made here:

First, natural selection being untestable is not the same as evolution being untestable. Evolution, to the creationist, is any hypothesis about origins. Astrophysical theories about stellar evolution or the "Big Bang" cosmology or scientific geology or, for that matter, many facets of biological evolution are not based upon Darwinian natural selection.

Second, Popper later admitted that he was wrong!

The fact that the theory of natural selection is difficult to test has led some people, anti-Darwinists and even some great Darwinists, to claim that it is a tautology. . . . I mention this problem because I too belong among the culprits. Influenced by what these authorities say, I have in the past described the theory as "almost tautological," and I have tried to explain how the theory of natural selection could be untestable (as is a tautology) and yet of great scientific interest. My solution was that the doctrine of natural selection is a most successful metaphysical research programme. . . . [Popper, 1978, p. 344]

I have changed my mind about the testability and logical status of the theory of natural selection; and I am glad to have an opportunity to make a recantation. . . . [p. 345]

The theory of natural selection may be so formulated that it is far from tautological. In this case it is not only testable, but it turns out to be not strictly universally true. There seem to be exceptions, as with so many biological theories; and considering the random character of the variations on which natural selection operates, the occurrence of exceptions is not surprising. [p. 346]

I would say Marxism as a whole, as well as many of its underlying theories are very similar in their testability. Marxism may be difficult to test, but it is not impossible. And as the data amasses, as we accumulate social, economic and historical data it becomes increasingly testable.

For example we can empirically test claims such as whether or not relative wealth has become more concentrated or centralized over time in capitalist systems, as would be predicted in Marx's "General Law of Capitalist Accumulation" using macroeconomic data. And such data indeed bears out the claim. To quote Professor of Sociology at the University of California:

Quote:

In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2004, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.3% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.3%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.2%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2007).

Table 1: Distribution of net worth and financial wealth in the United States, 1983-2004
Total Net Worth

Top 1 percent Next 19 percent Bottom 80 percent
1983 33.8% 47.5% 18.7%
1989 37.4% 46.2% 16.5%
1992 37.2% 46.6% 16.2%
1995 38.5% 45.4% 16.1%
1998 38.1% 45.3% 16.6%
2001 33.4% 51.0% 15.6%
2004 34.3% 50.3% 15.3%

Financial Wealth
Top 1 percent Next 19 percent Bottom 80 percent
1983 42.9% 48.4% 8.7%
1989 46.9% 46.5% 6.6%
1992 45.6% 46.7% 7.7%
1995 47.2% 45.9% 7.0%
1998 47.3% 43.6% 9.1%
2001 39.7% 51.5% 8.7%
2004 42.2% 50.3% 7.5%

This is a clear indication of an economic trend of increasing concentration of wealth among the top 1%, a class that would qualify as capitalist. Likewise the relative wealth of the under-classes, which are also the vast majority, has declined. I should note that the law of capitalist development, by definition, applies more strongly the more capitalist a system is.

Clearly social programs which negate capitalism will slow down, or could even reverse the trend as can be seen in say, Cuba or China, by wealth redistribution programs. But even then the economy tends to centralize, and Marx's law, as I noted, concerned capitalist development, not socialist.

[VorpalNeko]

Dermezel

...
Simply put privatization lead directly to asset-stripping and capital flight. To quote Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz:

Quote:

Stiglitz: Put yourself in the shoes of one of these oligarchs who has been given a gift of $10 billion. ...

Alright, pause right here for the moment. The fact there were oligarchs was itself a result of a failed economy that started to privatize as a stop-gap measure, which is what I said. This doesn't address the point at all.

In fact, it's putting the cart before the horse. Let my make my interpretation explicit so you can question it as you like. My position is:
-- The USSR's economy failed in the early 1980s, particularly in the per-capita sense: population was booming but economic growth receding.
-- Capitalism and privatization was introduced after that.
-- The GDP went up, but in terms of almost any material measure, the move to capitalism barely stabilized the economy.
-- In 1991, everything collapsed. Almost every single industry tanked, with oil as an exception.

Dermezel

This was not an inevitable collapse but a direct consequence of privatization and market liberalization.

It seems to me very silly to say that its its economic crash was the direct result of capitalism, rather than, for instance, the coup that happened right at the same time. Are you saying that was coincidental?

Dermezel

Quote:

Rather than providing incentives for wealth creation, privatization provided incentives for asset-stripping, with huge movements of capital abroad--$2 billion to $3 billion a month.

Perestroika was indeed ugly, but does its particular ugliness support your point? Why did many industries peak in 1990, even if many of them were still not up to their pre-depression levels a decade earlier? If you want to say that Russia would have been much better off under communism, that's quite fine. I agree with that completely. But you're attributing the 1991 economic collapse to capitalism, which is a much stranger claim that you don't provide any evidence for.

Dermezel

VorpalNeko

Do you have some Marxist account of why in the US, the crash is a few markets took out the entire economy?

Very much so. In fact Marx has a very explicit quote as to why a credit crisis (which is exactly what the US faces) occurs under capitalism:

The portion immediately following this specifies the issue in terms of regulation. You claimed that it is evidence against Keynes's position regarding regulation, utterly ignoring the fact that the credit crisis is a direct result of near-total deregulation of certain economic areas. Without that, the collapse of the real estate bubble, etc., would not have had such a drastic, global effect on the entire economy. If you want to say that's wrong, either explain why or get some better evidence. In fact, the current situation seems to support Keynes' position over Marx's precisely because without deregulation most of the conditions that led to it would not have happened!

I'll snip the further part, because 70% of just explains what happens in a crash and none of it has anything to do with the disputed stance on regulation.

Dermezel

I'm glad you asked this because this is an empirical prediction that can be tested directly against the facts. Consider for example how our trade deficit is fed directly by our credit system. In fact America's Total Debt Report (which measures public and private debt ) shows that our credit system has put us tens of trillions of dollars in debt. The underlying cause is trade deficit, the visible cause is a credit crunch. This is just as Marx would have predicted.

What about the prediction you advanced in your OP that it will happen despite regulation, which does not at all correspond to what actually happened? Because if you want to re-state your predictions without any reference to such factors, you're reducing the relevant prediction to roughly "if you let the monkeys run completely wild, they'll start fling s**t everywhere." That seems to be too true to be good: correct, but too vaguely general to be useful (although anarcho-libertarians don't seem to get it).

Dermezel

Regulations can of course help with this matter, but that of course is a move to a more socialist/government controlled economy.

In the OP, you implicitly admitted that regulation+capitalism is still capitalism. So what gives here? Regulation on trading does not imply nationalization of actual resources, so that is not socialism.

Dermezel

Karl Popper (the founder of the falsification principle in science) said the same thing about natural selection, initially rejecting it as untestable because it was, in his opinion a tautology: ...

Whether Popper was correct about falsificatio ism as a key principle in science is completely irrelevant about what he thought about X, Y, or Z.

Dermezel

Second, Popper later admitted that he was wrong!

Uh... so? Does natural selection, Darwinism, or evolution have any relevance to this thread? Generally, does Popper's opinion on the status of anything at all? He had an anti-Marxist axe to grind (and an anti-Freudian one), but I don't see why his stance on anything is of any import. There is one and only one issue relevant about Popper, and that is: was he correct in saying falsifiability is a necessary property of science? We can also ask whether it is a sufficient property.

--

Dermezel

This is a clear indication of an economic trend of increasing concentration of wealth among the top 1%, a class that would qualify as capitalist. Likewise the relative wealth of the under-classes, which are also the vast majority, has declined. I should note that the law of capitalist development, by definition, applies more strongly the more capitalist a system is.

Now we're getting somewhere. It certainly gives a sense that Marxism makes at least some falsifiable predictions. Then we can move on to whether they are correct--in this particular case, I've no problem with it, but I'm not completely clear on what you constitute as Marxism. For example, it seems to me that many of Marx's original predictions, particularly in regards to social development, were proven already wrong.

More relevantly here, if you really want to identify regulated capitalism with socialism, as you implied previously (although I really can't agree with such an identification), then you admit that Keynes was more right than Marx.

[Golden Dysprosium]

Dermezel

I would say Marxism as a whole, as well as many of its underlying theories are very similar in their testability. Marxism may be difficult to test, but it is not impossible. And as the data amasses, as we accumulate social, economic and historical data it becomes increasingly testable.

No, it doesn't. Because it's not science as we define it.Economic and historic data don't follow the empiricle method you claim it is.

Quote:

Clearly social programs which negate capitalism will slow down, or could even reverse the trend as can be seen in say, Cuba or China, by wealth redistribution programs. But even then the economy tends to centralize, and Marx's law, as I noted, concerned capitalist development, not socialist.

Now it just seems like you're trying to convert us by saying Marxism is a science, or at least follows the scientific method.

[Dermezel]

Golden Dysprosium

Dermezel

I would say Marxism as a whole, as well as many of its underlying theories are very similar in their testability. Marxism may be difficult to test, but it is not impossible. And as the data amasses, as we accumulate social, economic and historical data it becomes increasingly testable.

No, it doesn't. Because it's not science as we define it.Economic and historic data don't follow the empiricle method you claim it is.

Alright what about the law of mechanization, isn't that evident? Do not machines replace humans in industry, or is not more production due to machinery i.e. could we produce the same amount without machinery? I highly doubt it.

Or consider how corporations push out small companies. Consider empirical data such as:

Quote:

The richest 1% of adults owned 40% of the world’s total assets in the year 2000. The richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of total assets. The bottom half of the world adult population owned 1% of global wealth. (Source: World Institute for Development Economics Research, The World Distribution of Household Wealth, 2006).

"There were an estimated 7.7 million millionaires in the world at the end of 2003, half a million more than at the end of 2002, as stock markets and economic growth picked up and the rich took more risks with their cash.These wealthy individuals saw their riches increase by 7.7 percent to $28.8 trillion in 2003, recovering to levels seen before the global recession took hold in 2001, according to a survey on Tuesday from U.S. investment bank Merrill Lynch and technology consultancy Capgemini. And the rich are set to get richer, with their wealth forecast to grow by seven percent a year and to exceed $40.7 trillion by 2008, the survey predicted... The survey also highlighted a small, but fast-growing global group of 70,000 super rich individuals with more than $30 million in financial assets. It found that this group was growing at a faster pace than those in the $1 million-plus bracket." (World's richest worth $29 trillion in 2003; Survey: Wealthy now back at level before dot-com bust. MSNBC.com, June 15, 2004,)

Very Richest's Share of Income Grew Even Bigger, New York Times, June 26, 2003

In the late 1970s, the top one percent of the US population held 13 percent of the wealth; in 1995 it held 38 percent. (Levy, Frank. The New Dollars and Dreams ).

In 1998 the top 1 percent of the population owned 38 percent of the wealth, the top 5 percent owned over 60 percent (source: www.inequality.org/fatcsfr.html).

The top ten percent of the U.S. population owns 81.8 percent of the real estate, 81.2 percent of the stock, and 88 percent of the bonds. (Federal Reserve Bank data in Left Business Observer, No. 72, Apr. 3, 1996, p. 5).

One percent of the U.S. population owns sixty percent of the stock and forty percent of the total wealth. (Hawken, Paul, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. New York: HarperBusiness, 1993).

The top one percent of U.S. households owned 42 percent of all stock in 1997...
The top ten percent of households owned 82 percent of all stock-market wealth...
Only 27 percent of households held more than $10,000 in stock in 1997...
57 percent of Americans didn't own any stock at all...
The top fifth of households saw their income rise 43 percent between 1977 and 1999, while the bottom fifth saw their income fall 9 percent....
Since 1973, every group in society except the top 20 percent has seen its share of the national income decline, with the bottom 20 percent losing the most. They have just 3.6 percent of national income, down from 4.4 percent a quarter century ago.
Indeed, the top fifth now makes more than the rest of the nation combined...
Rebecca Blank, who recently left the President's Council of Economic Advisors, pointed out, ‘We've gone back to levels of income and wealth inequality that this country hasn't seen since the teens and 1920s.’" (Source: Merrill Goozner, Crash of '99?, Salon.com, Oct. 1, 1999).

The top one percent of Americans receive more income than the bottom 40 percent. (Korten, David. When Corporations Rule the World, p. 108 ) .

When he was worth $40 billion, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was worth more than the bottom 110 million Americans (the bottom 40 percent of the population). By 1998, Gates was worth $59 billion; a year later, he was worth $85 billion. Gates is twice as wealthy as the second richest American, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (worth $40 billion). (Source: open letter from Ralph Nader (December 1998 ) , citing Edward Wolff of New York University, whose calculations included home equity, pensions and mutual funds, but excluded personal cars, based on Gates' then-current net worth of $40 billion).

In 1995, 358 billionaires were worth $760 billion, the same as the poorest 20 percent of the world’s people. (Korten, David. When Corporations Rule the World, p. 83).

http://www.endgame.org/primer-wealth.html

This is all verifiable empirical data which clearly demonstrates a centralization and accumulation of capital.

[Golden Dysprosium]

Dermezel

Golden Dysprosium

Dermezel

I would say Marxism as a whole, as well as many of its underlying theories are very similar in their testability. Marxism may be difficult to test, but it is not impossible. And as the data amasses, as we accumulate social, economic and historical data it becomes increasingly testable.

No, it doesn't. Because it's not science as we define it.Economic and historic data don't follow the empiricle method you claim it is.

Alright what about the law of mechanization, isn't that evident? Do not machines replace humans in industry, or is not more production due to machinery i.e. could we produce the same amount without machinery? I highly doubt it.
Or consider how corporations push out small companies. Consider empirical data such as:

Quote:

Blah blah blah let's all become Marxists for no apparent reason.

http://www.endgame.org/primer-wealth.html
This is all verifiable empirical data which clearly demonstrates a centralization and accumulation of capital.

1. That's not "empirical data". That's just regular old garden variety statistical data compiled over a time period. Compare with something like this, which follows the empirical method. You're just barfing up numbers to cover up the fact that it's as scientific as the polls we run on Gaia with the 3rd option being "poll whore".
2. there is no "law of mechanization" in science. Mechanization is a (rather cold) business practice to save money and not have to pay workers. It's not something that happens based on inevitability, or even a legal obligation; it's still the decision of the owners of the company whether or not to replace workers with robotics. It's highly unlikely that we'll see it much in the customer service industry, but in terms of factory production it's a big cost saver.

[Vryko Lakas]

I googled "Law of Mechanization" and "The Organic Composition Model." The first returned two results, one in Chinese that I couldn't read, one a 2004 PDF discussing Carl Popper and talking about the role of habit as it concerns pedagogy. The second search returned only this: http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/viewthread.php?gid=2&tid=629088

[Golden Dysprosium]

Vryko Lakas

I googled "Law of Mechanization" and "The Organic Composition Model." The first returned two results, one in Chinese that I couldn't read, one a 2004 PDF discussing Carl Popper and talking about the role of habit as it concerns pedagogy.

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=Law+of+Mechanization&meta=
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=The+Organic+Composition+Model&meta=
It kinda proves my point. neutral