If Marxism is a science, then it must be testable and falsifiable. At least, that's my understanding of the scientific process. It's why Freud for example is considered unscientific. This theories have a lot of wiggle room, where any result can be turned into a proof or explained away.
Isn't this what we do with the various leftist projects? I don't know, I'm just confused why it is called a science and not, like, philosophy.
It's a science because it is a complex system of premises and inferences that are based on empirically observable phenomena. Take, for instance, something like the labour theory of value. That is an economic theory / argument grounded in reams of economic data collected over decades at first, and now centuries. The data can be used to show that what gives commodities their value is labour and nothing else, and other hypotheses simply don't make sense with the data. This by itself sets up a lot of the political implications of Marxism.
Or take something more "superstructural" and political, like the theory of class contradiction. This comes from a bunch of accumulated historical, economic, and anthropological data that shows that people across time have related to the means of production in qualitatively different ways that puts their interests at odds with each other, and that this is the driving force of history. Every other explanation for why history moves along the way it does is one-sided or arbitrary based on the information we have.
Sorry on LTV, it's not scientific in that way. Marx's theory of value is not normative. That is precisely the critique of Owenite and Proudhonist economists, they need labor to be the normative truth of value, truth obscured and falsified by the mysterious formation of prices in exchange. Marx argues in Capital that the mystery attends any and all generalized exchange relations, even if those were direct barters or were mediated by labor certificates. But he also argues that the labor that the Owenites and Proudhon want to find behind the mystery is, in fact, the mystery itself; value just is the form taken by social labor in capitalism.
Like fundamentally imo, Marx does not advance a labor theory of value as an economist. Rather than harping about LTV, I think the position of value-form theory is more accurate.
I don't know if I follow. By the LTV not being normative, do you mean that it doesn't work in a neat formula where you accurately determine value from some given amount of socially necessary labour time, like how physics equations work? I've yet to read Capital and have no background in economics so my knowledge of Marx's political economy is scanty and I could use some help getting clear on how the LTV actually operates and why value-form is more accurate.
Yeah it's not evaluative, like you're not supposed to calculate it precisely. Here I'll attach some pages of Marx's Inferno that explain my view in a pastebin.
And here's one of the footnotes worth putting up:
I will say that almost all criticisms of Marx on this front presuppose that Marx advances a labor theory of value as an economist, and, since “the central problem of economic inquiry” is “the explanation of the formation of price” (Roll, A History of Economic Thought, 373), the criticisms assume that Marx intends to explain the formation of price by appeal to the labor time necessary for the items bearing prices. It will be easy enough to see from my argument in the main text that I do not think Marx is at all interested in explaining price formation, and that, therefore, the vast majority of criticisms simply miss the target. In this conviction I follow the lines of what is generally called value-form theory. An influential early partisan of the position is Elson, who writes: “It is not [for Marx] a matter of seeking an explanation of why prices are what they are and finding it in labour. But rather of seeking an understanding of why labour takes the forms it does, and what the political consequences are” (“The Value Theory of Labour,” 123). Marx bases himself in a social ontology of cooperation, according to which he can say, for instance, that “social” “denotes the co-operation of several individuals” ( MECW, 5:43; MEGA, I.5:19). Different forms of society, including the global bourgeois society constituted by market interactions, are different forms of cooperation. It is this notion of society as shared labor, that grounds Marx’s conviction that the value of commodities, which mediates their circulation in commercial society, must be the form labor takes in that society.
Thank you, this clears a lot of things up. One quote from what you linked that really helped was:
I had always read that a product isn't a commodity unless it is socialy useful and can be exchanged but I was still unclear of its implications and how it refutes this mechanical idea of value.