Please see Part 1 above first.
Part 2 – The issue of “Laws” and “Tendencies” in Marx.
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra.
This is a fraught area, not just in Marx but in science and the philosophy of science, including Humean style empirical philosophy. It might be clear from my part 1 that I view a basic scientific law as NOT precisely an expression of event or process regularity but as a point-in-time regularity in a system, formally defined as closed, which regularity can be sequentially confirmed by further point-in-time observations. This is as in “A Fundamental Scientific Law is an expression of a relation (between two or more observable objects, forces or field values as variables) that is universal in all experimental observation thus far and invariant in manifestation under observation, to a standard of 5-sigma certainty, for the hard sciences.” Admittedly, this definition left open the question of point-in-time stasis versus time-in-process dynamics (taking the “arrow of time” from the net entropy process in the cosmos as ultimate closed system).
If time is reduced to a point in time, in conception, then the idea of cause must be abandoned and replaced by the idea of (“mere”) simultaneous conjunction. Laws then become not explanations of causes but merely descriptions of simultaneous conjunction to be expected (predicted to hold true) at any point in time. We expect Ohm’s Law to apply each time we test it and each time we use it in practice. I regard tendencies and trends, which are processes, as the emergent outworkings of the phenomena we attempt to capture with Fundamental Scientific Laws. There is always an explanatory gap in the emergence of tendencies and trends. Whether Marx and/or his interpreters had/have this in mind with ambiguous usages of “law”, “tendency”, “law of the tendency”, “tendential law” etc., I do not know for sure. I would view “tendency” as the predicted direction of action of a “law” provided it is not interfered with or modified by a new, confounding factor or “law”. Hence the Newtonian “law of gravity” on earth predicts all objects aloft will fall toward earth. That is the tendency of the law. But we know objects can be held up, kept aloft by aerodynamic forces and so on.
Jonathan Nitzan criticises Marx for “dialectical determinism” which “perhaps explains why many of his predictions failed to materialize.” But if someone is predicting a “tendency” based on “laws” whose inherent tendency may be modified, confounded or countervailed by other factors or tendencies (elsewhere detailed or left as open possibilities) then that person cannot be fairly charged with simplistic determinism. The question always arises of whether it is Marx or his more simplistic interpreters who are being dogmatically deterministic. Did “many of his predictions failed to materialize”? Did some which we focus on, employing our own confirmation bias, fail to materialize? Did all fail to materialize? Did some materialize in ways WE are failing to recognise? Are some yet simply to materialize in the future since the time progress of capitalism is not over? This is a Gish gallop for sure but not entirely unjustified if we are to systemically and comprehensively examine all the overt predictions.
“(T)he rising purchasing power of workers, the creation and spread of the welfare state and the proliferation of parliamentary democracies in a many countries (which) suggested far less inevitability than Marx had hoped for” can be seen as countervailing tendencies whether predicted or unpredicted. Of course, this can be bowdlerized philosophy or motivated political economy reasoning acting like an intellectually dishonest slippery eel and putting in qualifications AFTER the event… unless we can find some hypotheses related to these countervailing tendencies in Marx’s texts. If I get both really bored and really studious (a strange confluence of characteristics!) I may check Marx for these theses of countervailing tendencies. Or perhaps they are just magical unicorns I am too optimistically hoping to find? I think maybe not but I am not sure.
Is it the case that any contention that, “the rising purchasing power of workers” is a continuous and open-ended truth which holds for whole of the capitalist era and will continue to hold, is itself too dogmatic a claim? Has it not already failed? Have not wages in the US stagnated and fallen, differentially compared to returns on capital since about 1980 and the advent of the neoliberal era? Could this not be seen as the re-establishment of the main tendency of the original law after the exhaustion of a countervailing tendency (Keynesian Welfarism) ?
I have more thoughts but must leave it at that for now. If I am well off track or out of order from a CasP theory perspective, Jonathan and others need time to exercise right of reply rather than face an endless wall of text (gibberish?) from me. 🙂