SCHUMPETER, Joseph (1883-1946) [Pronounced: SHUM-PAY-ter]
Important Austrian bourgeois economist of the first half of the 20th century.
His father owned a textile factory, and not surprisingly Schumpeter found great virtues in
the capitalist system. He emphasized the importance of change under capitalism, and is
famous in bourgeois circles for his description of capitalism as “creative destruction”.
(Of course this is old news to us Marxists! In the Communist Manifesto Marx and
Engels say “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments
of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations
of society.” [MECW 6:487.])
At a time when most bourgeois economists
denied that economic cycles should even exist, Schumpeter said there were actually three
different ones:
1) A very short-term inventory cycle (which he called the “Kitchin Cycle”, after another
bourgeois economist, Joseph Kitchin), and which lasted 3 to 4 years;
2) An approximately 10-year cycle, which is the industrial cycle that Marx focused on (but
which Schumpeter—loathe to give any credit to Marx—called “Juglar Cycles”, after a
minor French economist, Clément Juglar, who talked about them long after Marx did). These
cycles were erroneously explained by Schumpeter as being due to changes in investment
patterns; and
3) Schumpeter’s version of Kondratiev’s 45-year long-term
waves, which Schumpeter attributed to waves in invention and innovation.
None of his discussion of economic cycles
had much validity, but by bourgeois standards even to have recognized the existence
of any cycles or waves makes you seem rather smart these days!
One of Schumpeter’s students was
Paul Sweezy, the primary founder of the
Monthly Review school of Marxist political
economy. While Sweezy broke away from Schumpeter and bourgeois economics in many ways,
there is still more than a touch of his ideas that were carried over.
SCIENCE OF REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM (Marxism-Leninism-Maoism)
[Intro material to be added... ]
“Marxism-Leninism is a science, and science means honest, solid
knowledge; there is no room for playing tricks. Let us, then, be honest.” —Mao,
“Reform Our Study” (May 1941), SW 3:22.
SCIENTIFIC LAWS
Human beings have found that nature is not completely random and chaotic, but that there
are certain regularities and patterns to it which can be discovered and often quantified.
A scientific law, or law of nature or society, is a statement of an order or relationship
between phenomena that so far as is known always holds true under the stated or implied
conditions. Thus, for example, the law of gravity is a statement about the mutual attraction
(and the strength of that attraction at various distances) between most of the various
forms of matter.
On rare occasions, mere tendencies or
probabilities are sometimes spoken of as laws, as with Marx’s discussion of what he calls
“the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall” (in Part 3 of Volume III of
Capital). But the modern practice is to describe such partial regularities not
as “laws”, but simply as “tendencies”. In the way the term is almost universally used in
science today there are never any exceptions to scientific laws. If exceptions to what was
previously thought to be a law are found, then either the scope of the application
of that law is narrowed to exclude such situations, or else (if that cannot be done) it is
no longer considered to be a law at all.
“I do not agree with the view that the universe is a mystery.... I feel
that this view does not do justice to the scientific revolution that was started almost
four hundred years ago by Galileo and carried on by Newton. They showed that at least
some areas of the universe ... are governed by precise mathematical laws. Over the years
since then, we have extended the work of Galileo and Newton.... We now have mathematical
laws that govern everything we normally experience.” —Stephen Hawking, Black Holes
and Baby Universes and Other Essays. [Of course there are still many mysteries in
all the sciences, but there is nevertheless a lot of validity in Hawking’s comment,
especially with regard to everyday scientific phenomena. To maintain that “everything
is a big mystery” is a way of ignoring or opposing science. —S.H.]
SCIENTIFIC THEORY
Scientific theories are the summation of scientific knowledge; theories form knowledge into
a logical and coherent structure and make a whole body of investigations comprehensible. Thus
the formulation of scientific theories is at the core of science and is its highest goal.
(Of course the goal in the application of science is to change the physical or social
world in one way or another.)
On the other hand there have often been
idealist tendencies in science, particularly in cosmology, “theoretical physics”, and the
social sciences, to divorce the construction of theories from the actual results of careful
investigations of nature and society, and to engage in wild flights of fancy with little or
no evidential foundation. Obviously what is needed instead is a dialectical combination of
practice and theory, and of careful investigation and the formulation and testing of theories
based on what has been learned in those actual investigations.
Scientific education should consist primarily
of two things:
1. Learning the scientific
method for science in general, and the specific scientific methods which are useful within
particular sciences; and
2. Coming to understand and appreciate the most
important scientific theories. That is, science education should be “theory-structured”.
Focusing on the explication of the most
important theories in a science actually makes that science both more comprehensible and
easier to learn. Speaking of his own science, Linus Pauling said in the preface to his 1947
book, General Chemistry, “The progress made ... in the development of theoretical
concepts has been so great ... that the presentation of general chemistry ... can be made in
a more simple, straightforword, and logical way than formerly.”
Revolutionary Marxism, or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism,
is also a science, and mastering it requires the same approach. One must focus on its central
theories and come to understand and appreciate them. And this requires some considerable study
along with participation in the ongoing revolutionary movement.
See also:
CENTRAL ORGANIZING THEORY
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A thought experiment in the philosophy of quantum
mechanics proposed by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, and designed to show
that the idealist Copenhagen Interpretation of
quantum mechanics had to be nonsense. Suppose, said Schrödinger, that you have a cat in
a sealed box where a quantum event (such as the detection or non-detection of the decay of a
radioactive atom) will determine if the cat will live or die (by either releasing a vial of
poison or else not doing so). The Copenhagen Interpretation of the situation is that the cat
is either both dead and alive until the box is opened to see the result, or else that
the cat is neither dead nor alive until the box is opened. Obviously either way is a
complete absurdity. (The defenders of the Copenhagen Interpretation have of course tried to
wiggle out of this predicament, but have not succeeded in coherently doing so!)