Wow, trying over . . . again! Two days ago I had this third section well under way but hit a delete button by mistake. I'm going to finish this one if I have to stay up until dawn.

In earlier sections I made the point about how "time bound" each of us is, by our age or youth, and that will come up tonight as I examine scientific socialism.

This time around we are taking on Karl Marx. What a wave of ideas floods through us with his name. "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" . . . "Scientific Socialism" . . . Dialectical Materialism . . . and all the millions who rallied to his name, and in too many cases were killed in his name. (Think of the appalling horror of the Khmer Rogue in Cambodia just after the Vietnam War.) One short email lesson can only start this discussion and we'll start it by going back to the 19th Century.

(There is one point that must be made about Marx before continuing. Marx was not a Leninist. He once said he was glad he wasn't a Marxist. The term "Marxist/Leninist" did not exist during Marx's lifetime. It is emphatically possible to be a socialist without being a Marxist, and to be a Marxist without being a Leninist. This is not to prejudge those terms - Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, etc., are all entitled to a hearing. But we'll open that box another time).

In earlier notes I had linked the rise of socialist thought with the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was closely linked to the rise of science. Without one, you would not have had the other.

When the Western world entered the 18th century, science had little grip on the imagination. We were still enthralled with sorcery, alchemy, astrology and magic. The wondrous cathedrals of the Middle Ages were a symbol of what had dominated our minds - the reach for heaven, for solutions that were religious.

But as science took hold, astrology gave way to astronomy, alchemy to chemistry, and magic to physics. Engines were built that ran by steam, and suddenly factories were possible. Machines of a thousand kinds were built. What was particularly wonderful about science was that it . . . worked. And it worked anywhere. A scientific theory meant that the theory could be tested by experiment anywhere in the world, by anyone, and the same result would be obtained if the rules were followed.

What we know today as "social sciences" (political philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology) longed for that term - science. But they aren't science at all. Economics cannot accurately predict - it doesn't matter whether your theory is Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or the latest in monetarism - when a depression will come, how long it will last, or what will stop it. Political science is, if you pardon me, a joke. An art, yes. A set of philosophies, yes. I'm trained in political science, that is what I got my BA in. And it isn't a science. If you think it is, go back to 1948 and look at who was supposed to win the 1948 Presidential election (Dewey) and who actually won it (Truman). (I was just 17 when that election occured, but I was so sure that I KNEW the rules of political science that I was in a state of deep shock and confusion for days after that election -- what Truman had done was impossible but, of course, it had happened. My only comfort was that Dewey was in even greater shock).

Karl Marx, and his coworker Frederick Engels, both were born and died in the 19th century. Together they wrote the four volumes of Das Kapital. In those volumes Marx and Engels laid out the basis for a political ideology they called "scientific socialism" to distinguish it from all the "utopian socialist" ideas that had come before. The concept of dialectal materialism was developed, (which I'll take up next time), the labor theory of value, and, most important for those of us who think of ourselves as Marxists, the approach of examining masses of data, of facts, before reaching conclusions. Marx sat in the British Museum, seeming to be the most innocuous of men, going through books, newspapers, collecting facts and from those facts building his theories.

Parts of those theories proved wrong, parts are very perceptive. But what gave them extraordinary importance was that Marx and Engels gave those theories the term "scientific" socialism. If it was scientific, it had to be true. Those of you who have studied the 18th and 19th centuries know how appealing science was. It had solved so many problems that it seemed to give promise of solving all problems. Science became the new religion in which humanity put its faith.

We have since realized some of our errors. Medical science can't be written off, but we have learned just in the past thirty years that the problem with Western medicine is that it is "curative," not "preventative." A great deal of what we read today about our health (eat fruits, vegetables, don't load up on sugar, etc.) was "crackpot" stuff in 1930, pushed by quacks. "Real doctors" solved things with pills, x-rays or operations. I'm not trying to make fun of doctors, only to remind us that our absolute faith in "medical science" has faded.

But at the time when Marx and Engels wrote, science had about it an invincible air. If something was scientific, it was true. And because people living at that time had seen this in the physical sciences - chemistry, physics, mathematics, etc., - they wanted it to be true of other fields, including political theory.

Marx was quite certain that the process of capital accumulation meant capitalism was trapped in an impossible contradiction, that because the owners of the means of production extracted a profit from what was produced, there was always a "surplus" which couldn't be consumed and would lead to steadily worsening depressions.

This is easy to explain. If the owner of a shoe factory bought $1,000 worth of raw materials, paid $3,000 for shoe machines, and hired fifty workers at $10 a day, and they produced a thousand pair of shoes each day, that means that the cost per shoe would be just $4.50 each. His total cost was $1,000 for materials, $500 for workers, $3,000 for shoe machines (which he will use over and over, so it isn't really fair to count this in for one day of production but I am simplifying to make my point) and the product for the day, a thousand pair of shoes. But the owners will sell each pair of shoes for - let us say - $10 each and thus make a net profit of $5,500.

The owner didn't create that remarkable value - the workers did. All the owner did was buy the shoe machines, the raw materials, and hire the workers. The owner did none of the work. The value was created by those workers. Let us be reasonable and grant that the owner actually did some work - he brought all these things together, he probably put in a long day himself, and so he should have a wage - let us even make his wage $100 a day, ten times that of his workers. He still ends up, after paying himself ten times what he pays each worker, with a profit of $5,400!

What happens? The workers can't buy back the shoes - they only took home $500 and can only buy fifty pairs of shoes and no food. Even if the workers bought the fifty pairs, and no food, you'd still have 950 pairs of shoes the owner is going to sell for $10 each.

Let's skip lots of problems that can complicate the point (the cost of selling the shoes, advertising, finding dealers, etc.) and realize that the owner came out of this transaction with a huge profit, but the workers created that profit. They each went home with $10 for the day while the owner ended up with a small fortune.

If all the owners of all the factories are doing the same thing, you can see society will soon be floating in goods - shoes, tea cups, pants, alarm clocks, etc., which the working class, taken as a whole, can't afford to buy back. The surplus value they created went to the owner of the means of production as pure profit. It wasn't that the factories produced "too much" but that because the owners of the means of production kept the profit - and profit is simply the difference between all the costs (including a decent wage for the owner) and the price at which the goods were sold - society as a whole can't buy back what it produces. If the "profit" had been evenly divided among all the workers, then all of the workers could afford to buy what they had produced.

Yes, the owner will buy things - a yacht, perhaps, or a country estate, and some of this money will "trickle down" to the workers. But the owner is always looking for new trading partners who may be willing to buy his shoes (or whatever else he is producing). Eventually even trading partners have had enough and there is a "glut of goods" on the market, a depression follows, millions are thrown out of work, and the system comes to a halt.

This is a very simplified version of the labor theory of value and why, in Marx's view, capitalism had recurring depressions. Marx also felt - and on this point he was clearly wrong - that the capitalist class, in order to maximize its profit, would drive down the wages paid to workers, that the workers who had nothing to sell but their labor (thus the term "wage slaves") would have no choice but to work for very little. Marx believed the working class would become poorer and poorer, that the economic crises would become deeper and deeper, and the result would be the eventual collapse of the capitalist system, with workers taking ownership of the means of production and leading the way to socialism.

It has been a long time now since Marx's predictions - and the working class as a whole is better off than it was then, and while capitalism continues to have business cycles, the last "great depression" was close to a hundred years ago. Capitalism has developed many ways of increasing the buying power of workers, through unemployment insurance, tax cuts, social security, etc. There is a point at which some "Marxist predictions" look more and more like the longing of early Christians for the "second coming." (If you go back to the Christian gospels it is very clear that for at least a hundred years after the Romans assassinated Jesus, his followers literally expected his return at any moment.)

What gave Marxism such enormous power was that it used the term "scientific" and thus the fall of capitalism seemed inevitable. Socialism was as inevitable as the rising of the sun. The old system was not only wicked, it was not workable. It would stumble to a halt. This kind of depth of belief has faded long since (it continues to exist in small ultra-orthodox Marxist sects in this country and elsewhere, but as a mass movement its time has passed). When Eugene V. Debs spoke to rallies early in the last century, as farmers and workers gathered to hear him, it was as if one could taste "the new day of socialism," which was within grasp. When Marxist parties developed in Europe and throughout the globe they had about them a sense of inevitable victory. All defeats were short term. The day of the revolution was close at hand.

We have learned since those days that capitalism is remarkably inventive about ways of handling surplus (war is one excellent way of disposing of surplus value), maintaining buying power (credit cards help), and avoiding a depression. It is still possible that "in the long run" Karl will be right. But as the great economist Lord Keynes noted, "in the long run we are all dead". Marxism has much to teach us, but it is not science. It cannot predict the future - only provide, at best, a hazy outline. And on that note I'll stop for tonight.