"Carrol Cox" <[email protected]> wrote: >Sometime in the last 40 years Paul Sweezy wrote an article in which he >explained why socialism could not be a science.
>He argued that whatever else socialism was, it had to be a democracy. But >science is the realm of expertise, and to hold that socialism was a science >was to deny the one essential feature of socialism. >I don't remember the date or the title of the article, and Sweezy made the >point rather better than I am making it here. >Can anyone identify the source. I found the following (earlier than your recollection) in the MR archives: Have read the Merleau-Ponty book [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism e et Terreur, Paris: Gallimard, 1947] and agree with you that it is excellent, despite some ideas which seem to me to be wrongheaded or untenable. If he would distinguish between Marxism as a general science of society and history and Marxism as the fighting faith of a particular movement in a given historical epoch, he would find himself with fewer apparent paradoxes on his hands. That the latter should undergo not only development but actual changes as conditions change is natural enough; while Marxism as science can only be developed and improved. -- Ron
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