The Marxist Critique of Science Has Run Out of Steam
Marxism has been reductively positioned against science for far too long.
By Sarkozy
The Peasant Dance, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1567)
Latour’s Concern
People rarely change their minds, especially about ideas they treat as fundamental truths. It’s difficult for a lifelong Christian to become an atheist, for a steadfast liberal to become an anarchist, for someone confident in the roundness of the globe to suddenly switch to believing that the Earth is flat. Bruno Latour, a longtime critic of science from a social constructionist perspective, renounces his lifelong commitment to critique in the essay Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. He was a few years shy of 60, hardly an age at which such profound changes of mind occur–yet, he found it necessary to publicly denounce the theoretical tradition he had spent so long developing.
At that point, most people are winding down their lives, preparing for retirement, welcoming grandchildren, and yelling at teenagers for any little social infraction. Maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised in this case, given that Latour is a philosopher; after all, anyone can have deathbed regrets. We should expect a critical mind to be critical till the very end. The essay was released in 2004. Latour died some 13 years later.
As the title suggests, Latour is concerned with critique. In particular, he’s concerned with his own field of social constructionism—the viewpoint that social processes and cultural standpoints shape the facts we take as natural or objective. It is a sociological perspective that recognizes how evolving societal norms and values shape the everyday forms of knowledge we take for granted as having been ‘discovered’ objectively through research or scientific investigation. What concerns Latour is the idea that social constructionism has become a weapon in the reckless hands of conspiracy theorists and political ideologues. Social constructionism would, for example, criticize scientific certainty, since it is historically contingent. Here we can see ideologues questioning scientific certainty in action:
Most scientists believe that [global] warming is caused largely by manmade pollutants that require strict regulation. Mr. Luntz [a Republican strategist] seems to acknowledge as much when he says that “the scientific debate is closing against us.” His advice, however, is to emphasize that the evidence is not complete [...] Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled,” he writes, “their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.
Latour feels guilty for contributing to the invention of a field known as science studies, a broad research area within the even broader field of social constructionism, centered on investigating the social and historical contexts that shape what we consider science. Here we can see his guilt on full display:
Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show “‘the lack of scientific certainty’” inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a “‘primary issue.’” But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument—or did I? […] Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast?
He fears that critique itself has “lost steam” in a world where Baudrillard, another well-respected French philosopher, claimed that the “Twin Towers destroyed themselves under their own weight,” in a world where a whole industry exists just to question whether the Apollo Moon landing ever actually happened. Latour is disturbed by the inverted social relationship between the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘bumpkin’. Through conspiracy, the clearly ignorant common man becomes the smug academic that looks down on intellectuals for knowing too much in the sense that they only know what they are taught in the ivory tower of academia, but are blind to the hidden reality provided by a conspiratorial view of facts:
What has become of critique when my neighbor in the little Bourbonnais village where I live looks down on me as someone hopelessly naive because I believe that the United States had been attacked by terrorists?
Constructionists, Positivists, and Conspiracists
A tension emerges whenever one takes a critical stance towards science. On one side of the tension are the social constructionists—the milieu of intellectuals that remind us that knowledge, especially what we call immediate knowledge, is never unmediated. What we know can never truly be free of social illusions, liberated from a particular standpoint, or neutral to determinations of history and culture. It is always a social process defined by human subjectivity more than it is by correspondence to an objective Truth. On the other side of this tension are the positivists—supporters of science who feel that scientists have earned the right to declare that their findings constitute absolute facts about the world, given not only the arduous journey of experimentation and research taken to get there, but also the objective usefulness of the results born out of this journey. Positivists pose an incredibly hard problem for social constructionists to answer: should the constructionists reject the results of, say, cancer research, despite all the scientific reasoning and experimentation it took to get to that research, and the proof of its validity by the countless lives saved by practices like chemotherapy? Wouldn’t the discovery of these practices be rendered impossible if the scientists behind it weren’t positivistic in their approach?
Conspiracists, as Latour pointed out, are critics of science as well, using (or misusing and abusing) constructionist justifications to reject scientific claims in favor of their alternative explanations of how things work. This is not to say that behind every conspiracy there is a constructionist justification, nor that conspiracies deal exclusively with the facts of science; however, I am only referring to conspiracists in a particular context: when the conspiracy ‘crosses the line,’ so to speak, when it implies or directly explicates a refutation of scientific facts. It is up for debate what ought to be considered a conspiracy vs. an actual theory and who is considered a conspiracist. So, for the sake of analysis, we should try to imagine who Latour himself would call conspiracy theorists when we delineate this group of people: flat-earthers, vaccine deniers, climate change deniers, and so on.
Scientific Socialism, According to Modern Marxists
Marxists recognize the determinate nature of history, culture, and society in our prevailing epistemic forms. However, instead of using that standpoint as a baseline for overcoming such forms, they move this point to the background of their thinking and become part-time positivists and part-time conspiracists.
Positivism follows a general intellectual movement in the collective mind of modern Marxism. In the first moment of thinking critically about science, science is apprehended as a bourgeois construct, as one of the family of typical idealist concepts deemed overly abstract, overly metaphysical, and obscuring a ‘true and correct’ perspective on material reality. In the next moment, Marx enters the scene, considered a tour de force in human form, one who develops the ‘true and correct’ perspective on material reality throughout the odd 65 years he lived. This line of thinking is developed both ideologically and objectively, as captured in the notion of scientific socialism. Scientific socialism, according to Marxists, is ‘scientific’ because it is objectively true, and is ‘socialism’ because it is directed toward a particular ideological end. The third moment is answering the question of what is to be done, identifying the revolutionary task of scientific socialism. The answer is always the same general idea: we must expose false bourgeois science and replace it with the revelatory science of Marxism, ultimately serving the demands of socialist revolutionary practice.
Scientific socialism, when understood this way, limits the scope of the term ‘science’ that Marx was operating against. He used the German phrase Wissenschaft, which roughly translates to ‘knowledge-ship’ in English. In this context, science is systematic and all-encompassing. In theory, such a science should extend beyond its formal limits. Science is known for its humility; it admits it can deal only with what is experimentally or theoretically confirmed (with theory usually being a mathematical framework). It has full confidence in its ability to describe the atomic bonds of organic chemistry, but it admits to being less effective in those problems of the so-called ‘soft sciences’ and beyond. Science is far less confident in measuring something like the amount of love someone has for a given object. Science is therefore not ‘total’ in the metacritical sense that Marx uses the term.
As for Marxist conspiracism, it is best described by Gramsci here:
As Engels wrote, many people find it very convenient to think that they can have the whole of history and all political and philosophical wisdom in their pockets at little cost and no trouble, concentrated into a few short formulae. They forget that the thesis which asserts that men become conscious of fundamental conflicts on the level of ideology is not psychological or moralistic in character, but structural and epistemological; and they form the habit of considering politics, and hence history, as a continuous marché de dupes, a competition in conjuring and sleight of hand. “Critical” activity is reduced to the exposure of swindles, to creating scandals, and to prying into the pockets of public figures.
Marxists look to Marx and historical materialism to provide a simple formula for explaining away the world’s issues—the bourgeoisie did it! This ruling class is a class of magicians and hypnotists, pulling wool over the eyes of the innocent yet inert subaltern classes again and again. This overly simplistic worldview isn’t very convincing for very long—sure, it might, through propaganda, create new revolutionaries. Still, it isn’t sustainable because it reduces the political and societal issues of our time to the doings of a large hidden actor. It is the same reason why, in modern society, general conspiracies proliferate. Yet, the movement to expose them never really takes off or mounts any meaningful resistance against the Big Evil. Ironically, the Big Evil is a mythology that leaves everything intact because it satisfies the urge for revolution without requiring any actual revolt. The only difference within the Marxist conspiracist worldview is that the Marxists, with their materialist perspective and political realism, are the ones who actually have a decent shot at exposing the world and doing something about it. Marxism is resolved into the ‘best’ conspiracy theory rather than a historical-practical critique.
Marxists, with their scientific socialism, fail to overcome anything because, as outlined earlier, scientific socialism is understood in ways that reinforce positivism, social constructionism, and even conspiracism. The scientific socialist gives ultimate authority to science by understanding Marx as an exceptional scientist in the present sense of the word ‘scientist’, and not as a critic of that present form. The failures of scientific socialism are bound up with the failures of the three views of science above.
Marx’s Science, According to Althusser
In the introduction to the first section of his famous study Reading Capital, Louis Althusser tries to refute a philosophy of the history of science and a view of ideology that he associates with the Enlightenment. Viewed from this classical perspective, ideology is equivalent to human error, while science is the truth and correction to that error.
Althusser sets up this attack on Enlightenment philosophy through a visual metaphor. To know something about a given object of knowledge is to “see” (vision) that object clearly, the clarity being the scientific understanding, while the erroneous ideological understanding is “oversight” (non-vision) of the real object. Marx, Althusser argues, challenges this mode by creating a “paradoxical identity” between vision and non-vision. He does so by apprehending the classical fields of knowledge in a profoundly clever way that is different from his predecessors. Marx apprehends classical political economy as providing the “correct” answers to questions that weren’t even posed by the field of political economy itself:
Classical political economy ‘produced’ (just as Engels will say, in the Preface to Volume Two, that phlogistic chemistry ‘produced’ oxygen and classical economics ‘produced’ surplus-value) a correct answer: the value of ‘labour’ is equal to the value of the subsistence goods necessary for the reproduction of ‘labour’. A correct answer is a correct answer. Any reader in the ‘first manner’ will give Smith and Ricardo a good mark and pass on to other observations. Not Marx. For what we shall call his eye has been attracted by a remarkable property of this answer; it is the correct answer to a question that has just one failing: it was never posed.
Marx’s reading, therefore, is not just a particularly accurate cognition of the capitalist system. Rather, he poses the question of what it means to cognize capitalism differently than the classical economists. This leads us straight to Althusser’s concept of the problematic—an underlying structure, ontologically grounded in history, that dictates what questions can even be posed in the first place. So Marx really changes the terrain in which the real object exists. Science can only pose problems, or questions and “correct” answers, within a given problematic. So the difference between science and ideology shifts from the opposition between incorrect belief (ideology) and “correcting” (scientific) belief to a matter of one configuration against another. This means that Marx is not providing a better answer to the question than the classical economists, but is shifting their field of investigation to ask completely different questions.
Althusser goes on to attack classical empiricism as an extractive enterprise:
The whole empiricist process of knowledge lies in fact in an operation of the subject called abstraction. To know is to abstract from the real object its essence, the possession of which by the subject is then called knowledge. [...] What does a real abstraction actually mean? It accounts for what is declared to be a real fact: the essence is abstracted from real objects in the sense of an extraction, as one might say that gold is extracted (or abstracted, i.e., separated) from the dross of earth and sand in which it is held and contained. Just as gold, before its abstraction, exists as gold unseparated from its dross in the dross itself, so the essence of the real exists as a real essence in the real which contains it. Knowledge is an abstraction, in the strict sense, i.e., an extraction of the essence from the real which contains it, a separation of the essence from the real which contains it and keeps it in hiding.
For Althusser and his reading of Marx, truth is not a matter of extraction. Nor is it a matter of development—a fundamentally teleological view of the forward march of rationality. Instead, knowledge develops in ruptures:
The real history of the development of knowledge appears to us today to be subject to laws quite different from this teleological hope for the religious triumph of reason. We are beginning to conceive this history as a history punctuated by radical discontinuities (e.g., when a new science detaches itself from the background of earlier ideological formations), profound reorganizations which, if they respect the continuity of the existence of regions of knowledge (and even this is not always the case), nevertheless inaugurate with their rupture the reign of a new logic, which, far from being a mere development, the ‘truth’ or ‘inversion’ of the old one, literally takes its place.
These ruptures are the very change in the structures of the terrain of scientific production itself; i.e., they concern which questions are asked, not the answers to those questions alone. Here we can conclude our discussion of Althusser’s interpretation of Marx with the idea of theoretical practice and knowledge as production. Marx understood knowledge not as a correct-versus-incorrect distinction of a pre-given object but as the real production of that very object. The very act of understanding is what produces the target object—the target object is not a pre-existing, given formulation but rather the very result of attempting to ‘see’ it. Production requires labor acting on some type of raw material; the act is only possible through some kind of means of production. Here, the ‘raw material’ is the external objective reality before cognition, the means of production is theory (in an abstract, ‘structural’ form, as our concepts and notions), the labor is thought, and finally, the result of this exercise (the production-result) is knowledge.
Science is a theoretical practice, an expression of the real determined by an underlying social formation. Instead of ideology and science being at odds, as understood in the classical sense, both science and ideology produce different kinds of knowledge, the content of which is determined by their underlying structure. The upshot of grounding science in historical structure is that our concept of science now conforms to the epistemological limits set by the terrain in which the practical activity occurs. We have shifted from an abstract-logical account of science to a historical-practical one. Althusser’s interpretation of Marx leads to the conclusion that new sciences are born out of ideology within a preexisting structure rather than from correcting the false epistemic value of ideology.
Heidegger, Pragmatists and Matters of Concern
After confessing his anxieties about the idea that critique is losing steam, Latour makes an interesting and unexpected transition to the theories of the controversial 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger. He does this to introduce an approach that could preserve the best parts of critique without ceding it to conspiracists and ideologues. Latour’s approach is centered on the distinction between the ‘object’ (Gegenstand) and the ‘thing’, a recurring theme in Heidegger’s philosophical work. The ‘object’ is “abandoned to the empty mastery of science and technology,” while the ‘thing’ is “celebrated” in that it gathers all the necessary contributions to its creation. The famous example Heidegger uses is a handmade jug to distinguish the ‘thing’ from the ‘object’. In its objectified form, the jug has definite coordinates in time and space, a definite geometric shape, and pours water in the precise way predicted by fluid dynamics, among innumerable other scientific and technological characteristics. In its ‘thingified’ form, the jug is a confluence—it is the nexus of: 1) how it was crafted, 2) what it holds and pours, 3) its parts, and 4) how others use it.
Sgraffito Puzzle Jug, Douglas Fitch & Hannah McAndrew (2023)
When treated scientifically, the jug is reduced to a set of well-defined qualities. When treated as a thing, it can be understood as a junction in which the whole world of social relations is expressed. Latour makes note of the etymology of the use of the word ‘thing’ in different European languages. It is connected to a “quasi-judiciary assembly”; for example, the Icelandic ‘Althing’ denotes its oldest parliament. Latour then wonders how it would be to treat the ‘object’ as a ‘thing’ in this sense:
What would happen, I wonder, if we tried to talk about the object of science and technology, the Gegenstand, as if it had the rich and complicated qualities of the celebrated Thing?
And so, Latour’s solution for bringing a pulse back to critique relies on transforming what he calls “matters of fact” into “matters of concern”. The fact goes from an ‘object’, bare, cold, measured, and final to a “thing”—gathered, assembled, and coalesced. When a fact is objectified, it leaves room for the alienated consciousness of conspiratorial thinking to take hold. But if, from the outset, we treated this fact as a ‘thing’, then we center the reality of the situation, the human actors behind it and the concerns of those actors, the various histories and genealogies that determine its understanding. What we are doing is adding reality to the fact, a reality excluded by the objectified, classically scientific approach to life and society. We move away from science and closer towards Wissenschaft.
For example, we can look at global warming. When the fact of global warming appears in its objectified form, a debate with two poles emerges around it. The positivists vigorously defend its existence while conspiracists vigorously attack it. But what if, from the outset, global warming appeared as a “matter of concern”? Our perspective would maintain its facthood while simultaneously illuminating the matter for all concerned actors by asking questions such as "Which populations are most affected by global warming?" “What are the epistemic conditions required to maintain the reality of climate change?” “Where exactly does the IPCC sit in the whole structure of the debate?” “Are they the only recognized institution for reporting on global warming, or do other such conflicting institutions exist?” And so on.
This isn’t to say that no one has investigated these questions. But to transform global warming from a matter of fact to a matter of concern is to center these questions as well as to approach the whole endeavor with an attitude that ‘all hands are on deck’ for all the things we know in reality, strictly scientific or not. It is reminiscent of ideas that appear in the work of two early pragmatists: Charles Peirce and John Dewey.
Peirce makes a similar move as Heidegger’s when it comes to the scientific truth of an object. For him, the question isn’t about how closely that truth conforms to details of its objectification, what Heidegger might call its apprehension through the “empty mastery” of science. Instead, he introduces a hypothetical community of inquirers to define the metric for what counts as true. Peirce’s maxim is that something is true only if it is a fact that we would settle on after concluding a collective investigation, with the process of investigation being hypothetically infinite. So, truth is whatever would be agreed upon after eons and eons of inquiry by a competent community of inquirers.
With this, Peirce acknowledges that there are always humans involved in the consideration of science and the treatment of facts. In this way, he historicizes science and treats it as a “matter of concern.” This should come as no surprise. To consider something a scientific fact is indeed a human practice in and of itself, and it is one that always involves the many. It isn’t that one scientific mind, in isolation, discovers something true by its own merit, by its conformity to the standards of science, and then, magically, that truth becomes science for the rest of us. Even in the case of the rare genius, there must be a confluence of opinions to elevate the findings of the rare genius from research to facthood. What is true, according to Peirce, has a positive limit placed squarely in the practices of human beings, rather than a negative limit of being absolutely and objectively true and nothing more beyond that, whether human beings are investigating the matter indefinitely or not.
Is this not a convergence similar to Heidegger’s thing vs. object? Peirce’s conception of what it means for something to be true presupposes the treatment of entities as ‘things’ in that it is necessarily a convergence of an opinion of a group of inquirers. So Peirce’s truth identifies at least part of the nexus that Heidegger describes, the part where the people who investigate the thing all gather.
If we treat materials, concepts, phenomena, as entities, as ‘things’ rather than ‘objects’, we are forced to view these entities as results of production in a similar way to Marx’s conception. This ‘democratizes’ our knowledge of the entity. What it means to know the entity no longer exists in the narrow confines of singular scientific discovery. It means not only knowing how the entity is objectified, but also knowing all the ‘hands’ used to ‘craft’ the entity in the Heideggerian ‘thingified’ sense. It recognizes a community of inquirers congealed in the entity.
Since, even as a hypothetical limit, this community of inquirers is made of human beings, and since human beings are social creatures, Peirce’s truth must entail a degree of sociality. But Peirce’s humans aren’t humans at all; they're abstractions, since truth itself is a limit that can never actually be reached. So, regarding a given objective fact, we can rescue Peirce’s own conception from the “empty mastery” of his logical philosophy by acknowledging that there had to be real flesh and blood, historically determined, culturally situated humans to produce said fact.
We don’t need to do much work to rescue Peirce’s conception from its own technical precision to give it the political upshot needed to return life to Marxist critique. That is done by John Dewey’s extension of Peirce’s community of inquirers into the idea of democracy. For Dewey, democracy functioned as a political system because it constructs a real community of inquirers who must investigate and solve problems collectively. The hypothetical community of inquirers that investigates indefinitely, as a regulative ideal for Peirce, is of much less concern in Dewey. Knowledge, under his framework, is instrumental in that it emerges to solve a social need. Does this not resemble Latour’s running theme of concern about science and knowledge? The notion of social problems that are collectively resolved implies that such problems are matters of concern since ‘all hands are on deck’ in resolving them.
Horkheimer and the Ensemble of Perspectives
There is one final perspective I want to introduce before tying together a vision for how Marxists can “return steam” to the critique of science. It is presented by the German philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer in an essay titled Traditional and Critical Theory. In this essay, Horkheimer draws a sharp distinction between the “classical” approach to theory and the “critical” approach introduced by critical theory itself. The classical manner descends from the philosopher and mathematician René Descartes: theory is treated as an ordered yet small system of basic propositions or principles from which all other theoretical knowledge is deductively derived and checked against. The facts about objects in this system belong to a structure that is implicitly ideal—it is a single, unified system that covers everything. Here, scientists take such facts as given, and in this approach the subject is held apart from the object. By consequence, knowledge is divorced from action—it is self-sufficient and timeless.
With critical theory, such a conception of knowledge is rejected. Horkheimer claims that the detached activity of the scientist is actually a specialized function within the social division of labor and the productive process:
The traditional idea of theory is based on scientific activity as carried on within the division of labor at a particular stage in the latter's development. It corresponds to the activity of the scholar which takes place alongside all the other activities of a society but in no immediately clear connection with them. In this view of theory, therefore, the real social function of science is not made manifest; it speaks not of what theory means in human life, but only of what it means in the isolated sphere in which for historical reasons it comes into existence.
Since both the object being perceived and the historical labor process shape the perceiving brain, facts are socially performed. Critical theory acknowledges this by making society itself the object of study. The subject becomes the concrete individual that is actually embedded in social totality. Under this newfound contextualization, the critical theorist enters what Horkheimer calls a “dynamic unity” with the oppressed class-theory becomes a force within the present situation working to change it:
If, however, the theoretician and his specific object are seen as forming a dynamic unity with the oppressed class, so that his presentation of societal contradictions is not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change, then his real function emerges. The course of the conflict between the advanced sectors of the class and the individuals who speak out the truth concerning it, as well as of the conflict between the most advanced sectors with their theoreticians and the rest of the class, is to be understood as a process of interactions in which awareness comes to flower along with its liberating but also its aggressive forces which incite while also requiring discipline.
Critical theory mutates the act of knowing—no longer is knowledge simply knowledge for its own sake, a “power” in the sense declared by Francis Bacon's legendary dictum (“knowledge is power”), but, rather, knowledge functions for human emancipation.
This is the final piece to the ensemble of perspectives being woven together to return “steam” to the Marxist critique of science. It isn’t simply that proper science is bourgeois while improper science is conspiratorial. Instead, science is not a matter of fact but rather a matter of concern, grounded in a historical-social-ideological terrain that necessarily limits its horizon. To respect this underlying structure, the facts must be “thingified” rather than “objectified”; they must be understood as forged by a real “community of inquirers” that we ourselves constitute. We as Marxists are on the boundary of a great liberating act—the “reattachment” of science and knowledge away from the traditional, quasi-mathematical system of first principles and towards the enriched grounds of human emancipation.
