Marxian Paradigms Versus Microeconomic Structures

Abstract

Most social scientists and social philosophers today regard their sciences, such as sociology and economics, as mere cognitive, passive disciplines that have the sole purpose of obtaining the best possible knowledge of the past and present states of our society. We may call this well-known view the ‘cognitive view’. It seems that only a minority of social scientists and philosophers view their sciences as active, dynamic disciplines with which they can not only invent and construct new societal structures and models, but also feel the obligation to realise models of a new society. Marx was a clear case of the latter type. However, whereas he was quite sure that the social scientist, as a scientist, has to begin historically and cognitively, he was never sure of his role as a realizer of the new. Should he be a mere architect or a revolutionary? An architect, e.g., should, according to a plan, propose better housing via continuous changes of existing housing, or proceed, as Marx did in Capital,in a democratic Keynesian manner; a revolutionary might even do this without a plan by appealing to the masses directly. He might appeal for a radical overthrow of the old in favor of something radically new as Marx did in the Manifesto. But appealing to the masses cannot be done in a merely rational, scientific manner. One has to conjure up the deeper layers of the human psyche, i.e., the emotional, irrational, and mythical foundations of social life. Marx did exactly that. He conjured up an almost religious paradigm of alienation — and entrenched belief and hope, and mobilized social anxieties, all to achieve his socio-revolutionary goal. In this paper we shall not discuss how this demagogic enterprise has been undertaken by Marx and his political followers, but we shall restrict ourselves solely to showing how and why, under the influence of the paradigm of alienation on the social and economic theories of his time, Marx became a revolutionary. The role of paradigms in revolutionary scientific development and their influence on scientific theories has been discussed widely in recent literature and has also been analyzed by the author in some publications.¹ One of the results of these analyses is that important paradigms are by no means created merely to change sciences; this is only a by-product of their cultural efficiency; more importantly, they tend to change society. They resemble far more powerful religious remnants of past cultures and societies that only secretly and randomly influence scientific development, very often simply by being the contrary position to all that the current science teaches us.