Scientific Socialism

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Scientific Socialism is the term used by Friedrich Engels^[1] to describe the social-political-economic theory pioneered by Karl Marx. The purported reason why this socialism is "scientific socialism" (as opposed to "utopian socialism") is because its theories are held to an empirical standard, observations are essential to its development, and these can result in changes/falsification of elements of theory. Although Marx denounced "utopian socialism", he never referred to his own ideas as "scientific socialism".

The term also refers to an important philosophical difference between advocates of laissez faire economics and those advocating a planned economy. Mainstream, bourgeois thought maintains that the latter is a virtual impossibility as it holds that the economic calculation problem is infeasible, impractical, and/or inadvisable. This viewpoint maintains that the best social planning is little or none at all and considers the subject of this article to be a contradiction in terms.

Attempts to engineer a new society via methods for doing so such as those proposed by B.F. Skinner (1949) and others are known but in practice communist states of the 20th century did not and do not use scientific methods in a substantive way for this purpose. Contributions such as those of Leontief and others were made at a high macroeconomic level or within the fields such as Operations Research on a microeconomic level but within a capitalist context.

The philosophy of science basis of the claim of Marxism-Leninism to be a science is based its conceptions of dialectical materialism and historical materialism.^[2]

Siad Barre, socialist leader of the Somali Democratic Republic, proclaimed scientific socialism as the national ideology as a repudiation of atheistic, Soviet-style socialism.

[edit] See also

• German wikipedia: currently, (June 2009), has the most complete article.

[edit] References

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