Social Democracy. I

Parade of SPD activists in Berlin on election day, January 19 1919. Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1972-033-15 / Gebrüder Haeckel / CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia.

Labor historian Eric Blanc, member of the Bread and Roses caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America, was on the radio trying to explain the DSA to the wider public, which I thought he was doing very well, but there was a point where I wanted to quibble (naturally, no socialist can ever bear to agree with another socialist about everything), which was when he described his ideological position in the DSA as on the organization's "right" (while acknowledging that it wasn't at all "right" in the general scheme of things), and I just think that doesn't mean what it's intended to mean—implying some kind of sympathy with a majority "center" imagined as too judicious to take sides, perfectly balanced between left and right views, an Aristotelian mean, as opposed to what it actually is, the gap at the middle of a bimodal distribution composed of the people who aren't able to ferret out enough information to make up their minds with any stability (maybe better illustrated as much wider and with narrower humps).

Via Wikipedia.

A more useful dichotomy would be the famous one proposed by young Karl Marx in the 1845 Theses on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." 

Marx regarded "left" and "right" as categories of bourgeois government, not something he, as an anti-bourgeois revolutionary, would want to apply to himself, but he did see this other distinction, between theory and praxis if you like, eventually serving on both sides himself, theorizing it in the reading room of the British Museum elaborating the edifice of Scientific Socialism at the same time as he was practicing it in his political participation in the 1848 German revolution (when he first joined a movement calling itself "Communist") and later the International Workingmen's Association, envisaged as the source of workers' parties seeking parliamentary power in Britain and on the Continent, and forming temporary alliances with the liberal bourgeois parties of the European left in efforts to improve the lot of the wage slaves of the Industrial Revolution, or the American Radical Republicans in their fight to abolish Black chattel slavery (as European correspondent of Horace Greeley's New York Herald).

Marx was both philosopher and activist, and it would be difficult to say in which capacity he would count as more "left" in today's sense, particularly hard-ass as a theorist and particularly lively as a practitioner; but I want to stress that praxis is pragmatic, and as much as "pragmatism" may often seem like faint-hearted hesitancy, it's really a matter of political judgment of what constitutes doing, as the Methodists say, "all the good you can".

Social Democracy as a name for something originated in Germany out of a movement in the 1860s to found local workers' education associations, under the influence of the exiled Marx through associates of his, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, but more importantly that of Ferdinand Lassalle, an originator of the idea of state-owned industries, on the grounds that the Prussian monarchy could serve as a potential ally of the working class against the bourgeoisie, an idea Marx deplored; willing to collaborate for workers' benefit with liberal bourgeois governments, he drew the line at conservative aristocratic ones. When Lassalle, on a visit to London, told Marx about his secret discussions on the idea with the Prussian Ministerpräsident von Bismarck, Marx was horrified. Lassalle, however, died in a duel in 1864, Germany finished its long transformation into the Second Reich (1856-71), and in the end, in 1875, the Lassallean General German Workers' Association (founded 1863) and Bebel's and Liebknecht's Social Democratic Workers' Party (1869) merged, to form the German Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands), with the bitter differences between the Lassallean and Marxian viewpoints not at all resolved, and which was banned in 1878, and finally unbanned in 1890 took its modern name of Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD),  

***

To understand what happened next, I need to dive into some territory where I used to be a lot better prepared than I am nowadays, in the question of just how "scientific" Marx's "scientific socialism" really was, where I mostly formed my opinions with the help of the philosopher of science Karl Popper, whose rule was that nothing presented as "objectively true" is ever any more than "not yet falsified". The only scientific statement that matters, for Popper, was the statement that could be falsified, by experimental evidence; if it couldn't, it wasn't really a scientific statement at all, but as long as it's not falsified you can keep working with it. Most of Popper's examples were drawn, in the early 20th century, from physics, and the scientific revolution in which Albert Einstein played such a vital part, but in The Open Society and its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism he got drawn into a political argument with Plato, Hegel, Marx, and Sigmund Freud (incidentally providing the intellectual basis for the philanthropy of Georg Soros) in which he rightly upbraids these thinkers for their use of unfalsifiable statements. Popper really hated Marx—not so much for his political aspirations toward social justice, which he appreciated*, as for his pretensions to scientificness; he hated Freud still more for the same reason, for his unfalsifiable theories.

*Indeed, he joined the Austrian Communist Party (English Wikipedia says the Social Democratic Workers' Party, but German-language sources don't, and it's pretty clearly an error) himself, at 17, in 1919 Vienna, but soon left, disillusioned after the incident in the Hörlgasse in which party leadership knowingly sent unarmed young demonstrators into a confrontation with Austrian police and 20 of them were shot dead.

Which I now think was not exactly wrong, but kind of judgy; after all, Marx and Freud both formed their ambitions at a time when Queen Victoria was alive, and even biology had hardly been invented as a science (it was known as "natural history"). It's not surprising that they were wrong, and not impossible that we might learn something from looking at their work. Moreover—this is something I'm just learning—Popper took a similarly jaundiced view of what I think we must consider the single greatest achievement of 19th-century science, the theory of biological evolution by natural selection, which he insisted wasn't a theory at all, in The Poverty of Historicism (1957), because it made no testable predictions:

The crucial point is this: although we may assume that any actual succession of phenomena proceeds according to the laws of nature, it is important to realize that practically no sequence of, say, three or more causally connected concrete events proceeds according to any single law of nature. If the wind shakes a tree and Newton’s apple falls to the ground, nobody will deny that these events can be described in terms of causal laws. But there is no single law, such as that of gravity, nor even a single definite set of laws, to describe the actual or concrete succession of causally connected events. . . . The idea that any concrete sequence or succession of events (apart from such examples as the movement of a pendulum or a solar system) can be described or explained by any one law, or by any one definite set of laws, is simply mistaken. There are neither laws of succession nor laws of evolution. (quoted in Mehmet Elgin and Elliott Sober, "Popper’s shifting appraisal of evolutionary theory". HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, Volume 7, Number 1, 2017)

Marx and Engels saw Darwin's Origin of Species, when it arrived in 1859 (same year as Marx's Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), as a kind of proof of the scientific validity of their own approach to socioeconomic evolution, in fact. Engels got a copy right away, and was overwhelmed with enthusiasm:  

Engels wrote to Marx “Darwin, by the way, whom I’m reading just now, is absolutely splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done. Never before has so grandiose an attempt been made to demonstrate historical evolution in Nature, and certainly never to such good effect.”

Marx [a year later] was just as enthusiastic, calling it “The book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.”

In a letter to the German socialist Ferdinand Lasalle, Marx wrote “Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle”

Wilhelm Liebknecht, a friend and comrade who often visited the Marx family in London, later recalled: “When Darwin drew the conclusions from his research work and brought them to the knowledge of the public, we spoke of nothing else for months but Darwin and the enormous significance of his scientific discoveries.”

What exactly did Engels mean by the "demolition of teleology"? How did it provide, for Marx, "a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle"? Teleology is, of course, the explanation of phenomena in terms of their purpose: whose purpose? In the case of a phenomenon as large as the evolution of biological species, it had to be God; while it was a familiar idea from the late 18th century (popularized in the poems of Darwin's grandfather Erasmus) that it must have taken thousands of years, not the biblical seven days, to accomplish the diversity of plant and animal species in the world, it wasn't imagined how it could have happened without God, or some kind of prime mover. Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, though he didn't quite imagine its driving mechanism, random genetic mutation, succeeded in conceiving a process that could run itself, without divine assistance, and Marx saw the possibility of extending that picture to the sequence debated by philosophers from Hobbes through Locke to Rousseau to Hegel of the evolution of human society, as a naturally inevitable process, from its putatively primitive origins to the complexity of the steam age, through the dialectical mechanism he'd been thinking about since his time as a "young Hegelian" but without any necessary spiritual element, as a product of "dialectical materialism". Society changed, basically, because it couldn't help itself; because as alternative orders arose and declared themselves as superior, the existing orders surrendered and withered away. Darwinian theory provided him not just with an analogy, but a science of which his ideas could constitute a direct part: that "the economic formation of society" was "a process of natural history".

The real problem with Marx and Engels as scientific theorists was that they didn't actually want to get rid of teleology; they wanted to get rid of the teleological agent, god or Hegelian Weltgeist or whatever spiritual supervisor, but keep the telos itself, the ending that the story was aimed at, seen as the liberation of the world's workers from the enslavement of capital, and this was precisely what Darwinian theory would never give them, the same thing that made Popper so mad; because it was driven by chance; by the accidental mutations an organism might or might not pass on to its offspring, and the outcomes were strictly unpredictable: who could have imagined during the mass extinctions of 65 million years ago that the mighty dinosaurs would survive as tiny versions of themselves, having learned to use their feathers to fly? Well, there probably wasn't anybody there to imagine it, but you see what I mean.

I have my own simple-minded idea of what makes evolutionary theory falsifiable—the law is just that evolution doesn't stop, at least not until the planet and the life it supports are completely destroyed; a prediction that has been tested and corroborated five or more times in the last four billion years on Earth, in events where 70% or more of the world's species died out and some kind of life managed to crawl back after a couple of million years or so, through the operations of natural selection among the surviving organisms (which makes for a lot of continuity which we can now see in the DNA analysis; of course many of the species that didn't go extinct aren't very clearly "superior", including viruses and amoebas, just very adaptive). The same has to apply to human society, that the different communities of our species have a lot of commonalities in their different ecological contexts, but are always changing in unpredictable ways—you can't say precisely what will happen, but you can be sure it will keep happening. Some communities in some places are better adjusted than others, and recent history over the last three or four centuries offers extraordinary examples of the spread of different kinds of developments technological and political, amazing progress and unspeakable cruelty. But a hundred years from now we could be living in the world of A Canticle For Leibowitz. 

***