I have been trying to source texts on Marxism and empirical methods for a while now. This is from a text I read today.
Source: Empirical Marxism
Gorman, Robert A.
History and Theory, 1981-12, Vol.20 (4), p.403-423
It's very Western Marxism. Ignores imperialism completely which is why it's able to arrive to the conclusions it arrives to. And does the "Stalin a priori bad, does not need explaining" that most academic texts does.
It talkes about Austro-Marxism, a new one for me:
Dismissed Bernstein but circles right back to reformism and non-violence.
Circles back the other way and introduces an Italian called Galvano Della Vople who immediately gets called a stalinist, but whos views on empirical Marxism are still analyzed.
This is where this got interesting:
Then a student of De Volpe, Colletti enters the debate:
The last parts in comments
CyborgMarx [any, any] - 4day
If a branch of "Marxism" ignores imperialism, then it's neither empirical nor Marxist
For fuck's sake there are schools of liberal thought that grapple with imperialism, there's literally no excuse
I haven't read it fully, I will now. Skimmed it just now and it is just what I need. From my reading within academia it looks to me like most of the writers fall into idealism and reformism one after the other and I want to try to completely avoid that, which is why I originally wanted to write a fully theoretical thesis. I haven't figured out yet if there is any way to interject what the uni wants me to without bastardizing marxist theory. Then again Marx used a lot of empirical examples in his work, I could maybe do that and keep it dialectical.
Last week I also read this one: link Sadly could not find it opensource anywhere.
7
Cowbee [he/him, they/them] - 4day
Yep, my understanding is that idealist empiricism has stood relatively counterposed to dialectical matetialism, and as such empiricist Marxists have often fallen guilty of idealism. It's an area I'm pretty uninformed on though, hence needing to investigate it further.
5
StillNoLeftLeft [none/use name, she/her] - 4day
Right so I am not completely off with my thinking.
The historical character of the ‘facts’ which science seems to have grasped with such ‘purity’ makes itself felt in an even more devastating manner. As the products of historical evolution they are involved in continuous change. But in addition they are also precisely in their objective structure the products of a definite historical epoch, namely capitalism. Thus when ‘science’ maintains that the manner in which data immediately present themselves is an adequate foundation of scientific conceptualisation and that the actual form of these data is the appropriate starting point for the formation of scientific concepts, it thereby takes its stand simply and dogmatically on the basis of capitalist society. It uncritically accepts the nature of the object as it is given and the laws of that society as the unalterable foundation of ‘science’.
Lukács seems to indicate that historicity assumes a dual function in comprehending facts within Marx’s framework: firstly, it elucidates that only through historical contextualization can we grasp how a particular phenomenon is shaped by its temporal and social background; secondly, it aims to illustrate that phenomena possess a specific temporal genesis, which arises from manifold determinations. This dual movement serves to expose the process of naturalization undergone by facts. Naturalization perpetuates the atomization of reality, its rational abstraction, and the isolation and essentialization of phenomena. Consequently, our perceptual acuity becomes compromised, leading us to perceive historical facts and phenomena as natural and timeless occurrences. The historical analysis of facts facilitates the overcoming of the dichotomy between the epistemic and socio-ontological dimensions of this specific mode of perception. According to Lukács, this characteristic was particularly striking to the initial readers of Marx’s Capital. This astonishment stemmed from Marx’s profound categorical critique of classical political economy concepts, alongside his demonstration of how these concepts are deeply rooted in and informed by historical events and characteristics. Marx’s method thus amalgamates a categorical, or logical, dimension of analyzing phenomena with a historical dimension. An exemplification of this approach can be observed in the third chapter of Book I of Capital, dedicated to money. There, Marx not only presents a logically coherent argument demonstrating money as a universal mediator derived from the value attribute of commodities, but also provides historical insight into how this process unfolded, tracing its origins from the development of markets, exchange processes, the establishment of treasuries and reserves, lending practices, and various forms of payment and receipt.
Within this context, Lukács presents dialectics as the privileged methodological approach that enables historicizing criticism of the naturalization of facts and phenomena. Consequently, through historical and dialectical analysis, we come to understand that there exists no identity between essence and appearance, or between what exists and how it is represented. This brings us to the famous quote from Book III of Marx’s Capital: “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.
Maybe I could utilize bourgeois empirical data to satisfy the need to "be empirical" and proceed to analyze them dialectically.
4
purpleworm [none/use name] - 4day
I don't really know what the context of this is, but since you didn't mention it that I've seen, Lenin uses a bunch of data from bourgeois sources in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism to talk about the concentration of productive forces over time and such.
4
Cowbee [he/him, they/them] - 4day
What is the goal of your research? You mentioned doing this for a university.
3
StillNoLeftLeft [none/use name, she/her] - 4day
It's relatively clear in my head, but not on paper yet. The broad goal is to apply Marxism to social work, to counter the currently hegemonic individualist framework that is typically based on poststructuralism, linguistics, psychology and other micro level discussions. As a result the discussion on the role and history of social work itself is very liberal and framed as something given, but not guestioned. There's a lot of discourse about power, agency, participation. Neoliberalism permeates the field.
There is a fairly marginalized Marxist tradition in social work. It has been referred to as radical social work and it's been more active in the past elsewhere, but never here. I've read a lot of these texts and they tend to be reformist or idealist. There is also a fairly small group of critical theorists. From my reading Marx has locally been either misread or misunderstood or read so superficially that discussions like species being versus human nature, idealism versus materialism have never even come up. Yet Marx gets dismissed due to "determinism".
My goal is to carry on with this "radical" research in the future and to do a dissertation that would open up the discussion on Marxism here, this is a very small country and an even smaller field. I firmly believe, from my own Marxist understanding, that as a theory it would fit the field that currently talks about a crisis of methodology. It's a field focused on praxis, but struggles to find a theory to fit the praxis, but refuses to look at Marxism. There is a lot of talk about emancipation, emancipatory praxis, but it tends to stay on the level of for example "symmetrical co-operation" where it isn't really aknowgedged how this cannot be in the current system and the answer always comes back to the mode of production and the way in which social work in a bourgeois state is one of the levers of the ruling class. Which is ignored.
At the same time there's a mandate for structural social work. This however is again studied within communication, accessibility, identity etc. and the structures of the system are left fairly untouched.
I wrote my bachelors about neurodiversity. It didn't take me long to become disillusioned with the way marginalized identities are handled in liberalism. My original plan was to write my masters about neurodiversity and the way this can't really get solved under capitalism, but realized I don't want to narrow it down to any one group of people. So I started to think about a way to study inequalities as manifestations of Marxist alienation (not liberal) and how this is heightened in people in the surplus population, the ones social work is expected to control/emancipate. My aim is to shift the focus back to class and the mode of production, to focus on the base and argue that the ailments we see today are products of capitalism. My goal is also to reject idealism and test my grasp of dialectics and historical materialism within social work research so I can get better at it. So this is a learning project as well.
3
Cowbee [he/him, they/them] - 3day
That's great! Have you read the chapters in Capital that go over the compulsion for the reserve army of labor? Capitalism's systemic expulsion of labor while multiplying its numbers is very well documented, and I'm sure you can find data backing it up.
3
StillNoLeftLeft [none/use name, she/her] - 3day
I have and will again, and again.
I also found the treatment of surplus population in Health Communism very useful for my own analysis.
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4
StillNoLeftLeft [none/use name, she/her] - 4day
Nice! This is it. Thank you, now I can share it around.
4
StillNoLeftLeft [none/use name, she/her] - 4day
The rest of the article:
Rate limit, will add the rest later.
Edit. The source was added to the comments by a comrade for anyone who wants to read the whole article. Not going to add more screenshots.
The reason I am reading about this is that I am looking to write my thesis using Marxist theory and I might be forced to add some form of empirical analysis to it for it to pass.
I understand that this is inherently difficult because marxism is a theory of the whole and for example alienation is a process that is society wide.
I study in a field of social science that is very divorced and poorly tied to any theory, tends to do microlevel analysis in the postmodern and post-structural sense and I am spesifically looking for a method that could tie society wide processes to individual experiences. To explain individual or lived experience through Marxism in a way that would pass the benchmarks of bourgeoisie academia. In my field Marx has been announced to not provide any usable methods whatsoever and the field is self-proclaimed to suffer from a crisis of identity and validity, due to the lack of theory.
I've been thinking about this from a base-superstructure angle and wondering if I could use the empirical data from social surveys for example to measure something like alienation and therefore "proving" it's validity. Or using the rising quantitative elements of inequality for example to explain qualitative change, in this case alienation. I am not sure if this is viable, because I am not well read enough in my Marxism.
4
purpleworm [none/use name] - 4day
The reason I am reading about this is that I am looking to write my thesis using Marxist theory and I might be forced to add some form of empirical analysis to it for it to pass.
I understand that this is inherently difficult because marxism is a theory of the whole and for example alienation is a process that is society wide.
I don't understand this problem exactly. Like, most Marxist writing is at a much larger scope, but there is no reason at all that it can't be focused on a much smaller scale, and even in the canonical texts it usually is (e.g. alienation being explained in terms of a group of workers on a production line; the fetishism of commodities explained in terms of a single item at a store and the "personal" history of that object being obscured and abstracted).
I see you're in social work, and it's sort of hard to usefully apply Marxism to a single individual in isolation, but that individual still needs to face society and many of their problems are a completely immediate result of social functions, e.g. class antagonism causing problems at work.
6
Cowbee [he/him, they/them] - 4day
You can use data that has been hypothesized and tested empirically with Marxist analysis. Dialectical matetialism places material reality over sensory experience, whereas empiricism focuses mostly on the latter as it engages with matter. Empiricism, taken to a vulgar extent, merely states that it believes that which is directly tested without taking it beyond and connecting it to other phenomena (in oversimplified terms). Data taken from social surveys is absolutely valid for Marxist analysis, Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc all use data taken by bourgeois sources in Capital,Imperialism, etc.
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4
StillNoLeftLeft [none/use name, she/her] - 4day
Yes, this is it. Thank you. I have access to these from my uni, but can't share them from there without revealing myself. Which is why I use screenshots or copy/paste.
4
juniper [none/use name] - 4day
I study in a field of social science that is very divorced and poorly tied to any theory, tends to do microlevel analysis in the postmodern and post-structural sense and I am spesifically looking for a method that could tie society wide processes to individual experiences. To explain individual or lived experience through Marxism in a way that would pass the benchmarks of bourgeoisie academia. In my field Marx has been announced to not provide any usable methods whatsoever and the field is self-proclaimed to suffer from a crisis of identity and validity, due to the lack of theory.
I'm curious, why are you studying this small field of social science in the first place? If this is all just to get a good grade on a uni assignment I feel you, but why go through the effort of writing a thesis for an academic field that doesn't take theory seriously? If you are trying to carve out a niche for yourself in grad school and eventually the wider academic market, I wish you the best of luck. It seems self-defeating to invest so much time into shoehorning Marxism into some academic discipline that is actively opposed to it.
3
StillNoLeftLeft [none/use name, she/her] - 4day
It's social work which is why I considering it to be such an important discussion to re-open. The reasons for Marx being sidelined are in this case deeply politically motivated.
I consider it worth my time especially in the context I am in: a small country with a history of anti-communism that lives mostly as an undercurrent to everything due to historical repression.
7
juniper [none/use name] - 4day
Cool, thanks for the reply. I was thinking you were USian and studying something like "political science" or the like. Cheers comrade.
StillNoLeftLeft in theory
Reading about empirical Marxism
I have been trying to source texts on Marxism and empirical methods for a while now. This is from a text I read today.
Source: Empirical Marxism Gorman, Robert A. History and Theory, 1981-12, Vol.20 (4), p.403-423
It's very Western Marxism. Ignores imperialism completely which is why it's able to arrive to the conclusions it arrives to. And does the "Stalin a priori bad, does not need explaining" that most academic texts does.
It talkes about Austro-Marxism, a new one for me:
Dismissed Bernstein but circles right back to reformism and non-violence.
Circles back the other way and introduces an Italian called Galvano Della Vople who immediately gets called a stalinist, but whos views on empirical Marxism are still analyzed.
This is where this got interesting:
Then a student of De Volpe, Colletti enters the debate:
The last parts in comments
If a branch of "Marxism" ignores imperialism, then it's neither empirical nor Marxist
For fuck's sake there are schools of liberal thought that grapple with imperialism, there's literally no excuse
Have you read Materialism and Empirio-Criticism? It's a work I have been meaning to read, might be worth your while.
I haven't read it fully, I will now. Skimmed it just now and it is just what I need. From my reading within academia it looks to me like most of the writers fall into idealism and reformism one after the other and I want to try to completely avoid that, which is why I originally wanted to write a fully theoretical thesis. I haven't figured out yet if there is any way to interject what the uni wants me to without bastardizing marxist theory. Then again Marx used a lot of empirical examples in his work, I could maybe do that and keep it dialectical.
Last week I also read this one: link Sadly could not find it opensource anywhere.
Yep, my understanding is that idealist empiricism has stood relatively counterposed to dialectical matetialism, and as such empiricist Marxists have often fallen guilty of idealism. It's an area I'm pretty uninformed on though, hence needing to investigate it further.
Right so I am not completely off with my thinking.
Reading a text quoting Lukács just now and:
Maybe I could utilize bourgeois empirical data to satisfy the need to "be empirical" and proceed to analyze them dialectically.
I don't really know what the context of this is, but since you didn't mention it that I've seen, Lenin uses a bunch of data from bourgeois sources in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism to talk about the concentration of productive forces over time and such.
What is the goal of your research? You mentioned doing this for a university.
It's relatively clear in my head, but not on paper yet. The broad goal is to apply Marxism to social work, to counter the currently hegemonic individualist framework that is typically based on poststructuralism, linguistics, psychology and other micro level discussions. As a result the discussion on the role and history of social work itself is very liberal and framed as something given, but not guestioned. There's a lot of discourse about power, agency, participation. Neoliberalism permeates the field.
There is a fairly marginalized Marxist tradition in social work. It has been referred to as radical social work and it's been more active in the past elsewhere, but never here. I've read a lot of these texts and they tend to be reformist or idealist. There is also a fairly small group of critical theorists. From my reading Marx has locally been either misread or misunderstood or read so superficially that discussions like species being versus human nature, idealism versus materialism have never even come up. Yet Marx gets dismissed due to "determinism".
My goal is to carry on with this "radical" research in the future and to do a dissertation that would open up the discussion on Marxism here, this is a very small country and an even smaller field. I firmly believe, from my own Marxist understanding, that as a theory it would fit the field that currently talks about a crisis of methodology. It's a field focused on praxis, but struggles to find a theory to fit the praxis, but refuses to look at Marxism. There is a lot of talk about emancipation, emancipatory praxis, but it tends to stay on the level of for example "symmetrical co-operation" where it isn't really aknowgedged how this cannot be in the current system and the answer always comes back to the mode of production and the way in which social work in a bourgeois state is one of the levers of the ruling class. Which is ignored.
At the same time there's a mandate for structural social work. This however is again studied within communication, accessibility, identity etc. and the structures of the system are left fairly untouched.
I wrote my bachelors about neurodiversity. It didn't take me long to become disillusioned with the way marginalized identities are handled in liberalism. My original plan was to write my masters about neurodiversity and the way this can't really get solved under capitalism, but realized I don't want to narrow it down to any one group of people. So I started to think about a way to study inequalities as manifestations of Marxist alienation (not liberal) and how this is heightened in people in the surplus population, the ones social work is expected to control/emancipate. My aim is to shift the focus back to class and the mode of production, to focus on the base and argue that the ailments we see today are products of capitalism. My goal is also to reject idealism and test my grasp of dialectics and historical materialism within social work research so I can get better at it. So this is a learning project as well.
That's great! Have you read the chapters in Capital that go over the compulsion for the reserve army of labor? Capitalism's systemic expulsion of labor while multiplying its numbers is very well documented, and I'm sure you can find data backing it up.
I have and will again, and again.
I also found the treatment of surplus population in Health Communism very useful for my own analysis.
? https://annas-archive.org/search?index=journals&q=Using+Marx's+theory+of+alienation+empirically (use the SciDB option)
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
Nice! This is it. Thank you, now I can share it around.
The rest of the article:
Rate limit, will add the rest later.
Edit. The source was added to the comments by a comrade for anyone who wants to read the whole article. Not going to add more screenshots.
The reason I am reading about this is that I am looking to write my thesis using Marxist theory and I might be forced to add some form of empirical analysis to it for it to pass.
I understand that this is inherently difficult because marxism is a theory of the whole and for example alienation is a process that is society wide.
I study in a field of social science that is very divorced and poorly tied to any theory, tends to do microlevel analysis in the postmodern and post-structural sense and I am spesifically looking for a method that could tie society wide processes to individual experiences. To explain individual or lived experience through Marxism in a way that would pass the benchmarks of bourgeoisie academia. In my field Marx has been announced to not provide any usable methods whatsoever and the field is self-proclaimed to suffer from a crisis of identity and validity, due to the lack of theory.
I've been thinking about this from a base-superstructure angle and wondering if I could use the empirical data from social surveys for example to measure something like alienation and therefore "proving" it's validity. Or using the rising quantitative elements of inequality for example to explain qualitative change, in this case alienation. I am not sure if this is viable, because I am not well read enough in my Marxism.
I don't understand this problem exactly. Like, most Marxist writing is at a much larger scope, but there is no reason at all that it can't be focused on a much smaller scale, and even in the canonical texts it usually is (e.g. alienation being explained in terms of a group of workers on a production line; the fetishism of commodities explained in terms of a single item at a store and the "personal" history of that object being obscured and abstracted).
I see you're in social work, and it's sort of hard to usefully apply Marxism to a single individual in isolation, but that individual still needs to face society and many of their problems are a completely immediate result of social functions, e.g. class antagonism causing problems at work.
You can use data that has been hypothesized and tested empirically with Marxist analysis. Dialectical matetialism places material reality over sensory experience, whereas empiricism focuses mostly on the latter as it engages with matter. Empiricism, taken to a vulgar extent, merely states that it believes that which is directly tested without taking it beyond and connecting it to other phenomena (in oversimplified terms). Data taken from social surveys is absolutely valid for Marxist analysis, Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc all use data taken by bourgeois sources in Capital, Imperialism, etc.
Seems like https://annas-archive.org/md5/67265436c6147a3b9b7a4393544faada (again, I recommend using the SciDB option)
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
Yes, this is it. Thank you. I have access to these from my uni, but can't share them from there without revealing myself. Which is why I use screenshots or copy/paste.
I'm curious, why are you studying this small field of social science in the first place? If this is all just to get a good grade on a uni assignment I feel you, but why go through the effort of writing a thesis for an academic field that doesn't take theory seriously? If you are trying to carve out a niche for yourself in grad school and eventually the wider academic market, I wish you the best of luck. It seems self-defeating to invest so much time into shoehorning Marxism into some academic discipline that is actively opposed to it.
It's social work which is why I considering it to be such an important discussion to re-open. The reasons for Marx being sidelined are in this case deeply politically motivated.
I consider it worth my time especially in the context I am in: a small country with a history of anti-communism that lives mostly as an undercurrent to everything due to historical repression.
Cool, thanks for the reply. I was thinking you were USian and studying something like "political science" or the like. Cheers comrade.