Scientific Socialism

Two Discoveries

Engels's definition is short. The materialist conception of history holds that the mode of production and exchange is the basis of a society's structure and of its politics, law and ideas, and that the means of ending class antagonism are to be found in the mode of production of the epoch rather than in people's heads. The theory of surplus value lays open the secret of capitalist appropriation: how wealth is produced out of labour the capitalist does not pay for. 'These two great discoveries… we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a science. The next thing was to work out all its details and relations.'

The point is not a capacity to picture a better society but a method for reading the conditions of transition out of the laws of motion of this one. The name is only fully legible beside its pair: one side designs by reason, the other reads what history has prepared.

Where the Name Comes From

The adjective was not Engels's invention; it was already circulating in nineteenth-century French socialist argument. What the 1880 pamphlet did was fix the pairing and carry it everywhere, after which the Marxist current used the name of itself.

The Name Becomes a Course

In the USSR the name became an institution. On 27 June 1963, order no. 214 introduced 'scientific communism' as a compulsory subject in higher education. The move was driven by Mikhail Suslov, and the new subject absorbed the sociological part of historical materialism. A phrase Marx and Engels had used for their own standpoint became a department and an examination.

The shift cuts both ways. It meant the theory had institutional backing on the scale of a state; it also meant that propositions requiring testing hardened into textbook entries. The price of the second became plain in the 1980s.

What Is at Stake

A claim to be scientific carries a heavy demand: a readiness to revise when predictions fail, and a refusal to duck contrary evidence. Marx and Engels often met it. The 1872 German preface to the Communist Manifesto records that parts of the programme had been overtaken by the experience of the Paris Commune, and in this pamphlet Engels folds new forms (joint-stock companies, state takeovers) into the analysis.

Conversely, the entry betrays its own name whenever 'scientific' is used as a seal guaranteeing conclusions in advance. The history of calling the equation of state ownership with socialism 'scientific' is the standing example. Remembering that Engels, in a footnote to this very pamphlet, called that equation a spurious socialism makes the point clear enough: the way to keep the name is verification, not authority.