Flowers for Marx and Science

John Milton Bunch

30 September 2025

I’m going to repurpose the floral metaphor here and use it to discuss two related, but distinct, topics related to Marx and science as discussed by Burgis, Hamilton and McManus in Flowers for Marx. In what might be for some readers the more maudlin sense, I’ll address the question of “Can Marxism be a science,” and conclude that no, it cannot, unless we reject the definition of science that scientists themselves use.

And in the more hopeful, spring-is-in-the-air sense, I’ll address the deeply intertwined questions of “Can Marxism be studied scientifically,” and “Can science itself be used to further Marxist goals.” The answer to both of those questions is undoubtably yes. Although a yes with caveats, of course, because to approach a question with science means being willing to give up or modify existing systems of belief, and a good bit of this essay is devoted to exploring this particular aspect of the relationship between Marxism and science.

I want to add to the hopeful sense by saying that as an intellectual product generated by social media discourse, Flowers for Marx is about as good as it gets and I congratulate and thank the authors for what they’ve done. I have some personal experience attempting to promote productive leftist discourse in the very same contemporary urine swamp and have found it more often than not a place where real thinking and learning go to die, or worse, be resurrected as profilicity-driven schizophasia. Flowers for Marx is something wholly different.

Also, this essay is not intended to be polemical as I’ve got no political project to sell or promote. For my part in general, and with regard to this essay in particular, I’m not claiming to be a socialist or a Marxist, nor am I claiming to be opposed to or outside of either. Instead, I’m trying to read Flowers for Marx through the lens of someone who seems to share similar normative beliefs to the authors about how the world should be, but is utterly ambivalent, and not just a little flummoxed, with regard to a theory of how it gets there.

Defining Marxism and Socialism

Before we get into a discussion about science and Flowers for Marx, I’ll first attempt to define exactly what we mean by both Marxism and socialism, then discuss the definition of science.  I’m going to define Marxism as a worldview, or a model of the world, inspired by something within the scope of the original work of Karl Marx and Marx-influenced writing of the intervening century and a half. There are many variations of a worldview put forth in this literature, but to tie this discussion to the ground I’ll use what I can identify as perhaps critical shared elements of each of the unique Marxisms espoused by Burgis, Hamilton and McManus.

First and foremost, in Marxism there is a shared belief that mode of production, a phenomenon characterized by a specific socio-economic relationship between human beings under capitalism, is itself exploitative, in that it extracts an inordinate quantity of resources from one person (a wage laborer) for the benefit of another. Most people in a capitalist society are dependent upon wage labor to sustain themselves and are thus part of a specific economic class of exploited workers. Further, this capitalist mode of production has a tremendous influence on how members of society think and act.

Socialism is a socio-economic system distinct from capitalism in which those otherwise dependent upon wage labor under capitalism are no longer subject to this exploitation. To clarify, I’ll simply adopt Ben Burgis’ statement from an earlier article⁷:

Socialists want to replace the current system of private ownership of the means of production with a new system based on collective ownership and economic democracy.

Beyond this, the intellectual edifice and goals of each unique Marxism and/or socialism begin to differ, and often substantially so.

To summarize, in the simplest possible terms, socialism is a desired form of social and economic organization to replace capitalism. Marxism is the acceptance of a theory of the world of humans that, among other things, provides an explanatory model of the operations of capitalism.

Science and Explanatory Model-Building

The perspectives on and implicit definitions of science appear to vary a bit in Flowers for Marx but are generally discussed or explicated in relation to Althusser. My intention here is not to critique Althusser² nor any particular philosophy of science, but rather to consider Marx in the manner of a contemporary scientist studying the phenomena with which Marx was concerned. Also, my attempt here Is not to criticize any of the definitions of science used by McManus, Burgis or Hamilton, but to simply ensure I’ve provided a clear definition of it for use in this discussion.

Mention is made in Flowers for Marx of Popper, and to a lesser extent Quine, and I don’t find the claims made or the discussions themselves to be off-base, so much as simply a bit anemic. For example, yes, science progresses through falsification. However, falsification is not the only element of scientific model-building, and the theory becomes neither scientific nor true simply because it hasn’t been falsified (just to clarify, I’m using the terms model and theory interchangeably).

The key consideration is a scientific theory’s ability to predict the behavior of the phenomena under study, as this is how it is ultimately judged. What the scientist is looking for is the most parsimonious explanatory model that best predicts measurable observations.  Science isn’t about proving theories to be true. It’s about creating explanatory models that best explain what we see, and that’s as close as we’re going to get to proof or truth.

Also, it’s worth noting that the phenomena with which Marx was concerned, and to which science would ostensibly be applied, were not the motions of stars and planets. Marx was concerned with human behavior. In the contemporary practice of science, Marx’ work would fall across many fields in which a scientific methodology might be applied, including but not limited to economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history.

Different authors, such as Herbert A. Simon⁵, have discussed and characterized the nature of the application of science to human vs. non-human categories of phenomena, attempting to identify the specific epistemological challenges faced in each case. While the specifics of this are up for grabs, few would argue that a scientific methodology is different between these categories, but nonetheless possible.

The approach to science I’ve described above is often called post-positivism and is the contemporary scientific approach through which any discussion of Marx and science must be considered. This is the way science is generally practiced today in the fields across which Marx’ work falls and was described by Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions⁸.

This approach makes a couple of primary assumptions about the world – first, that the universe follows natural laws (which simply means that nature is not capricious). Second, that people can gain at least enough purchase on these natural laws that explanatory models capable of accurate prediction can be assembled. Explanations are ultimately probabilistic, with a goal of producing the most likely explanation for an observed phenomenon.

In practice this means that a scientist may spend a career building a theory, only to abandon it as new evidence comes to light.

For an example of how this plays out among real scientists, I’m going to refer to a paper by James J. Jenkins⁶, an experimental psychologist and professor of mine who described in detail his own experience with this process. Jenkins was trained as a behaviorist, meaning he had adopted a specific paradigm (in Kuhnian terms), or meta-theoretical structure, within which explanatory models are built, and within which to build explanations of human behavioral phenomena such as language and memory. This includes assumptions about such things as what constitutes valid information about the phenomena under study, and assumptions about the scope and form of causal mechanisms.

In the above paper, Jenkins refers to his previous behaviorist paradigm on memory and language as associationism, which held that the results of memory experiments and other psychological events could be explained via a basic, finite set of units and the relations between them. Many experiments were conducted and papers written and published under this assumption, all attempting to explain the results of experiments in which subjects had been given various forms of list-learning tasks, and associationism seemed to offer the correct (what Jekins called) meta-theoretical framework within which to create a theory to explain the results he was finding. At the time, behaviorism was the dominant paradigm within which the study of such phenomena across all of experimental psychology occurred, and Jenkins had made a name for himself in the field through this work.

Eventually, he and his colleagues discovered that differences in the performance of subjects for things such as differences in instructions given to experimental subjects in recall tasks could not adequately be explained via the association of finite sets of units (for example, lists of words) alone. While many researchers facing such problems attempted to shoe-horn their findings into the associationist framework, Jenkins adopted a different meta-theoretical framework (i.e. paradigm), contextualism. When he did this, his explanatory theory improved greatly, and he was able to predict experimental results with more precision. This broke the rules, so to speak, of the associationist paradigm, as the contextualist perspective posited active processes at work in memory that the associationist framework would not allow.

Jenkin’s story is an example of the paradigm shift in experimental psychology from behaviorism to cognitivism that occurred in the 1960’s, and of, in Jenkins own words, why you must be willing to recognize and admit that a model isn’t working, and change it in the face of new evidence.

In the case of the results of human memory experiments, such as those of Jenkins and colleagues, it’s easy to see how a scientist could take a somewhat detached position, and radically modify existing models, even if substantial career currency has been invested in them. But when those models deal with something less technical and more personal, such as why history and society play out as they do, and one’s own role within that process, the ability to modify or reject one’s accepted model becomes much, much more challenging.

The upshot for the interaction of science and Marxism and/or socialism is that scientific explanations always have an element of uncertainty. You must be willing to change your explanatory models when the evidence no longer supports them or better supports an alternative explanation.

Interestingly, as Ben Burgis notes in Flowers for Marx:

…Marx himself frequently revised his views in light of new considerations or new evidence and spent an awful lot of time wearing down his seat at the reading room of the British museum precisely because he felt the need to keep track of the most current social-scientific research and incorporate it into his understanding of how capitalism worked and how it might be overcome.

Sounds like Marx and Jenkins weren’t too far apart in their model-building methodology.

The Interaction of Scientific Methodology and Different Marxist Frameworks

Therefore, when considering the issue of Marxism and science, it’s important to consider one’s own reasons for being concerned with Marxism in the first place. Some people are drawn to socialism for moral or ethical reasons and drawn to Marxism for its utility in offering insight into the current state of capitalism and how movement toward a more egalitarian socio-economic system after capitalism might proceed. For this group, Marxism can be considered an explanatory framework for the social world, not unlike Jenkins originally found associationism to be an explanatory framework for human memory.

Science has a great deal to offer here, as predictive models of human behavior, society, economics and social interaction increase the chance of success in moving toward a more socialist future. To the extent this group is focused on socialism as a goal and is willing to change existing models of the world in the effort to reach that goal, science provides a powerful tool.

Others, however, have a commitment to Marxism first and foremost, and see socialism as something wholly dependent upon Marxism. For this group, science often seems to appear as Satan from the Book of Job - a constant adversary and inquisitor attempting to derail the True Marxist from the path of God. As Jenkins said, to do science you must be willing to recognize when your model isn’t working and change it. If you aren’t willing to do this, you can’t use science.

McManus in particular seems to have an awareness of the above and lets it come to bear on his discussion. In regard to Althusser’s discussion of Marx and science, McManus accurately states “But from a purely scientific standpoint… why should the existence of class power be taken as oppressive, and not simply a social fact about which the true scientist has no opinion aside from analysis?”  This is an important point, as it clearly establishes the scientific goal of understanding a specific phenomenon (what we observe to be “class power”) from our own moral or ethical feelings about it. If we can do this, and build or modify our models with new information, science becomes possible.

McManus also provides a useful anecdote here from philosopher Derek Parfit, in which an economist presents a formula he describes as free of bias. Parfit intervenes, and notes that the economist has predicated his entire presentation on the assumption that it was better for people to be well off and happy than not. The writings of Marx are filled with seemingly similar assertions – such as the assertion that wage labor has specific, deleterious effects on workers. Are you willing to question that? If not, science can’t help you.

The Incrementalist Approach of McManus and Burgis and Really Existing Data

McManus and Burgis represent incremental approaches to socialism, in which incremental political change moves society from its current form to some form of socialism. Personally, I’d like to believe such a program would work, as it seems reasonable and democratic – socialist policies are gradually implemented via the voting booth, with voter appraisal and approval of each successive policy change.

McManus and Burgis do not seem opposed to, or at least their discussion does not seem inconsistent with, the application of science to the furtherance of their project of incremental progress toward a socialist future. In other words, if the data indicate that some part of their model is weak, they seem willing to adjust it.

Which brings us to the million-dollar question – what does science say about the feasibility of their program and its chances of success? The cold hard answer is this – I don’t think it looks promising unless some critical issues are addressed. To be clear, I am not making the inane claim that “science says socialism is impossible” or “science says capitalism is natural” or any such thing as that.

Rather, it looks to me as though significant individual differences exist in, among other things, the way people process and come to understand politically relevant information, and these differences present a very serious challenge to the incrementalist project as currently expressed. In future essays I hope to explore in detail some of the specific scientific findings from the relevant disciplines that I think come to bear on and support this conclusion, but I’ll give a few examples here.

Let’s consider the findings of political and biological scientist Pete Hatemi¹⁶ and colleagues in a recent showdown over the Moral Foundations Theory of social psychologist Jonathon Haidt¹⁷. In a 2017 paper, Hatemi and colleagues present a compelling argument against Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory. Briefly, Haidt and colleagues presented results which they explained with a model in which people have different biological predispositions for certain moral orientations, and these moral orientations, or foundations, translate into political affinities.

Hatemi and colleagues challenged this, and in an analysis of monozygotic twins raised together and apart discovered that, essentially, there was no need to include “moral foundations” in the explanatory model. The takeaway here for our purposes is that separate lines of research, from different fields (social psychology in the case of Haidt and political science/biology in the case of Hatemi) both found biologically-based differences in political orientation. Also, to be very clear, this is not an argument for the culturally-dreaded-in-Marxist-circles concept of “biological determinism.” It is simply evidence that, included in the myriad of social and other external forces that shape the political affinity a person ultimately expresses, there are biological drivers that must be accounted for.

Next, let’s take a look at the “frames” and “conceptual metaphors” theory of cognitive linguist George Lakoff⁹. Lakoff has found evidence that voting decisions, voter understanding and preference is driven by (what he calls) conceptual metaphors that exist deep within the cognitive framework to provide meaning and interpretability to whatever election-relevant information voters process.

He finds, for example, that conservative voters tend to operate from a “strict-father” metaphor, in which one’s experience in the world, and normative beliefs about how the world should be, is contingent upon placating a powerful master. Liberal (in the American, generally partisan political sense) voters, on the other hand, tend to operate from within a nurturing parent metaphor, in which caring for and being cared for by others provides the framework for understanding the world and making voting choices. These conceptual metaphors are deeply baked-in to the human information processing system, are very resistant to change, and guide how we experience and locate ourselves within the social and political space.

Another finding of Lakoff that seems particular relevant here are the individual differences in information processing ability between causative models requiring systemic vs direct causation. When considering cause and effect mechanisms, sometimes causation can be described as direct. For example, punching someone in the nose causes a nosebleed. Other times, causation can be described as systemic, as in the interaction of various anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic drivers of atmospheric buildup of CO², changes in average global temperature over time, and sea level rise.

What Lakoff finds is that some people struggle greatly with understanding explanations for things involving systemic causation and will reject such explanations in favor of simpler ones because of it. This is especially salient here, as there is a certain amount of systemic causation baked into most leftist theory and discourse, and this will lead to many voters choosing other alternatives they can more easily understand.

Finally, to more fully demonstrate how the above findings come to bear on the incrementalist project, let’s consider the above findings within the context of the past 100 years of electronic media. In the days of radio and newspapers, Walter Lippmann¹⁰ argued that an informed public did not, and could not, exist, and that better education and more democracy would not overcome the problem of Aristotle’s non-omniscient citizen.

Lippmann suggested that voters make choices based on stereotypes and mental shortcuts and would not do the work necessary to adequately make informed voting decisions. In other words, not unlike Hatemi, Haidt, Lakoff and other scientists, Lippmann concluded that individual differences in the way people process politically-relevant information would be a challenge for political programs attempting to win public support based on reason, logic and a coherent picture of the best interest of the voter.

His solution was epistocracy, which, at the end of the century, Herman & Chomsky decried in Manufacturing Consent with the claim that a propagandized, manipulated, centralized media environment was the reason that the public votes against its own best interest. As I write this, well into the era of the Internet with the entire corpus of recorded human knowledge at everyone’s fingertips, the data indicate that people do not understand the issues upon which they cast their votes any more significantly than they did in Lippmann’s day⁴. In fact, Lippmann’s observations of the behavior of the newspaper reader in 1925 apply without modification to the media consumer of today¹⁰.

Given even these few examples, from both the scientific laboratory and media culture, I’m not sure how a voter-dependent program of political change is to work when it’s dependent upon voters who don’t understand issues, have political leanings influenced by their own unique physiology, struggle with the systemic causations demands of leftist discourse, are highly resistant to change, and do not take advantage of the resources available to educate themselves.

I don’t know that these issues are insurmountable for McManus and Burgis, but certainly they require attention, and I haven’t seen any proposed incrementalist program that adequately addresses them. Bhaskar Sunkara’s The Socialist Manifesto, for example, a popular and recent treatise on an incremental socialist program, certainly does not.

It’s reminiscent of the famed quote by Adlai Stevenson. A supporter exclaimed "Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!" Stevenson answered, "That's not enough. I need a majority.¹⁴"

None of this points to impossibility, and both McManus and Burgis may very well be able to overcome my concerns, and I very much hope that they can. But they’ve got a lot of challenges ahead of them, and it certainly gives rise to skepticism.

The Perilous Path of Marxist Fundamentalism in Social Media Discourse

This brings us to Conrad Bongard Hamilton and his Freudo-Marxist politics of rupture. There is no science here. Not even an attempt, and it isn’t clear to me why Hamilton seems insistent on qualifying Marxism as a science. Hamilton has a model of the individual provided by Lacan³, located within a model of the social world provided by Marx. It is an example of what could be called Marxist fundamentalism in that there are assumptions made and causal mechanisms proposed that cannot be subjected to extensive revision, modification or rejection.

As the incrementalist approach is dependent upon voters coming to an intellectual understanding of at least a few important Marxist ideas, and deciding that these ideas apply to them in specific and profound ways, it’s easy to see how a tension could develop between McManus and Burgis on the one side and Hamilton on the other, as the incrementalist is utterly dependent on the rational, logical voter.

Voter education is critical to the incrementalist, and such an undertaking has at least one formidable foe in contemporary public discourse: profilicity, a term coined by media philosophers Hans-Georg Moeller and P. J. Ambrosio¹¹ to refer to the central driver of engagement and interaction in the contemporary space of electronic media. Our identity in the world today is one created via our online profile/s, which we manage and curate through the process of acting while being seen acting by others.

Specifically, this presents challenges for the incrementalists because it works against the incrementalists need for individuals to come to rational conclusions of the sort “yes, I understand what’s meant by wage labor, and yes, I see how it negatively impacts me.” Instead, such an assessment can only be made relative to how others will see one make the assessment and come to that understanding. What’s important is the extent to which such as assessment comports with the social semantics one understands and values, and to which one appeals, and the various stereotypes and mental shortcuts that might be in play.

In practice, this means that rather than providing a mechanism for learning, contemporary public discourse is one of profile-building. Freudo-Marxism is particularly vulnerable to non-logical excess in public discourse and it’s not difficult to see how it could be experienced as an albatross around the neck of incrementalists. It can provide a very slippery slope for an information consumer to tread, especially with regard to the work of Marx.

I’ve watched this play out in my own experience attempting to promote leftist discourse in the Youtube/podcast space. Specifically, for example, I’ve seen how a fundamentalist Marxism (with or without the psychoanalysis) can function as something akin to religion, with not only science viewed as a foreign threat, but learning new things that contradict the group dogma considered to be anathema to the discourse. In profilicity-driven media the action happens in the space between personal and group identity, and a critical part of this is the definition and marking of shared worldviews. Intellectual inquiry itself always takes a back seat to this process. The social media user is specifically looking for, and evaluating, potential group identity, and this involves the non-conscious information processes of stereotypes, mental models and metaphorical frames discussed earlier.

In this milieu, it’s the specific Marxist and/or psychodynamic explanation of the world that holds the most value and importance, and not specific phenomenon, such as wage labor, to be explained or overcome. The work of Marx and/or Lacan can easily become a sort of holy writ, with research methodology or way of knowing focused on its exegesis and the receiving of divine illumination from what Marx and/or Lacan REALLY meant.

Science, with its probabilistic theory and lack of definitive truth, has nothing to offer here. The truth is what Marx or Lacan said it was, and if someone outside the bounds of group affinity disagrees with our interpretation it’s because they don’t understand Marx, therefore they don’t understand the social/political world, but we do. An important part of group cohesion is the idea that the members of the group have escaped Plato’s cave and know what the True Light looks like compared to non-group members who live in the dark. This becomes a world of Marxist gurus competing with one another in a contest of textual piety, who’s entitled to wear the crown of divine illumination, and who gets to be the group’s shaman.

Education and the spirit of inquiry upon which McManus and Burgis depend get lost here, and discussions of science (not to mention other formulations of Marxism) often take the form of a Marxist apologetics in much the same way as fundamentalist Christianity often takes an apologetic form when discussing scientific challenges to its dogma.  Science is either dismissed as corrupt (a tool of capitalism / the work of Satan), epistemologically flawed (there are unresolved issues in the philosophy of science therefore Marx is True / theories of biological evolution have changed over time thus creationism is True), or simply not applicable (science can’t tell us anything about human behavior / only God knows why people act the way they do). Like the fundamentalist Christian, this type of Marxist has a sense of certainty concerning the human pageant and is not willing to give that up or modify it in the face of contradicting objective information.

Combine this form of public discourse with a deep history of anti-Marxist propaganda already at work in the culture, and McManus and Burgis are given a hard row to hoe, thus a palpable tension between incrementalists and fundamentalists is not unexpected.

Hamilton’s Freudo-Marxist Politics of Rupture

However, with the above being said, Conrad Bongard Hamilton avoids these pitfalls and maintains genuine intellectual honesty. His analysis is questioning, critical, internally consistent and cannot be dismissed as Marx-guruism. Most importantly, he’s got something that Burgis and McManis lack – a comprehensive model of both society and mind, and how all the pieces fit together. Science or no science, it isn’t without insight.

In the best and most legitimate of cases, ANY example of human behavior can be explained through the combination of Marx and Lacan. There are forests worth of paper dedicated to Freudo-Marxist analysis of films, plays, novels, political events, historical episodes, etc., each providing a compelling analysis. But there’s an apparent and seemingly usefulness-killing caveat for our purposes within a political project– the thing to be explained must be in the past. It has little to no quantifiable predictive value and would thus seem useless for improving the chances of success with real-world political projects. However, maybe it’s on to something.

As an example, Hamilton analyzes Althusser’s use of Lacan’s mirror stage, making a point in response to McManus about Althusser’s perspective on science and ideology. My point in mentioning this is not to comment on either’s reading of Althusser, but simply to identify an instance where Hamilton is able to call upon Lacan to clarify what is essentially a specific psychological claim and definition within a discussion having some practical bearing on a political project, in this case the nature of ideology.

The mirror stage is theoretically critical in creating Lacan’s split subject². And from a scientific perspective, it’s completely invalid. Researchers have been studying developmental behavior in children for a very long time (Jean Piaget, Lacan’s francophone contemporary, had radically different ideas about child development and stage theory, for example) and there is just no evidence for, and a good bit of evidence against, any actual episode or collection of objective events one could reasonably identify as a mirror stage as Lacan describes it.

However, it’s a useful concept when discussing things such as the inchoate processes of self-awareness and recognition of individuality happening within the young child. These things do happen on some level and in some way, and it’s not unreasonable to want to extend their impact into the world of epistemology and adult decision-making. Most importantly for this discussion, any model science has yet provided of how this happens is too anemic to be useful. So either we don’t wrestle with the questions or we use the tools we have available, including Lacan.

Lacan developed his model from his experience attempting to solve the practical problem of explaining the behavior of analysands laying on the couch, a problem that hasn’t changed much for psychotherapists of today. Science simply doesn’t give us much of an explanatory model of neurotic behavior, so either we step outside of science, or we don’t deal with the issue. While some systems of psychotherapy, such as Cognitive Behavior Therapy, can be said to be informed by science, none qualify as applied science in the manner of say a vaccine. The reason is simple – science hasn’t told us enough to allow for the creation of such a thing. The psychotherapy example is apt here, as when we look at the quantitative data comparing the therapeutic outcome of different systems of psychotherapy, we find that psychoanalysis generally holds its own against scientifically informed approaches¹².

Lacan created a rich language for, and a comprehensive model of, entities and mechanisms within the human psyche, and thus provides intellectual tools useful in discussion when psychological phenomena need to be invoked. Science doesn’t yet provide a model with anything close to this ability. In his discussion of Althusser and ideology, it allows Hamilton (and Althusser) to negotiate a nuance in human thinking I think might be difficult to do otherwise.

Interestingly, a Lacanian approach to understanding political decision-making can produce outcomes with a striking similarity to the scientific findings on individual differences I mentioned above.

Todd McGowan¹³, for example, in his Lacanian analysis of the American right vs. left on gun control, finds stark libidinal differences in political orientation between individuals. A libidinal difference is deep-seated within the human psyche and highly resistant to change. In other words, McGowan’s Lacanian analysis finds something not at all inconsistent with the findings of Haidt, Hatemi, and Lakoff mentioned earlier – the way we interpret information and understand the world, and thus come to view political issues, can vary radically between individuals and is very difficult to change.

It's the recognition of individual differences and the seeming irrationality of human decision making that Hamilton’s Freudo-Marxism seems to share with the results of science. And while it seems to depend upon faith in Marx and Lacan, rather than the scientific validity of its models, McManus and Burgis also depend on faith – faith in existing democracy and the possibility of its evolution. And perhaps there’s even less scientific evidence for the validity of that.

Hamilton’s Freudo-Marxism leads him to propose a politics of rupture, and this brings me to the paradox. When considering what science has to say, it looks to me like he may be right. I have no idea how such a rupture would be brought about, what form it would take or any inkling of what to do the day after the revolution, but it seems to me that a seriously radical transformation of both the individual and the social might be the only way forward.

The form of the proposed rupture, to me, remains completely unknown. As McManus quite rightly points out, historical attempts at revolution have, at a minimum, failed to produce lasting, sustainable societies free from labor exploitation. Also, it seems clear that any approach based on the idea that a specific set of new social conditions can be established by a state or a vanguard party, and that the populace will react to these conditions by changing its behavior in a predictable way, is begging for disaster.

As follows from the discussion above concerning individual differences, there are a couple of features that a rupture must include. It would have to include not only a radical change in mode of production, but also a radical change in the human substrate upon which it runs, and the latter must likely precede the former. Importantly, while none of the authors seem to be making the counter-argument, it’s worth noting that there is no teleological end-game through which capitalism fails and socialism is the result. There must be an intervention.

Building on Common Goals

Which brings us back around, here at the end, to what McManus, Burgis and Hamilton have in common. There is a certain type of what I would describe as a universalist Christian flair at work in all of their thinking, and maybe that needs to be better understood. Echoing Alasdair MacIntyre¹⁵, it seems to me that Marxism is attractive here because it expresses a secularized version of a strain of Christian feeling with regard to the nature of human freedom and value. It doesn’t mean this feeling is unique to Christianity, or originated in it, or that Marx was a secret Christian, just that it found expression there, and thus in Marx, as the product of a Christian (or perhaps post-Christian) western/European milieu.

Also, I’m calling this a Christian feeling, or maybe intuition, to indicate that it was something already there before conscious thought found a way to express it as an affinity for Marx. This would be consistent with the scientific data described earlier, as well as Lacan, all of which argue for the principal of emotional primacy - emotions precede and color conscious thought.

Of course, the discussion I present above may run afoul of Marxism in a profound way. In his discussion of the Marxism of G. A. Cohen, for example, Burgis discusses a framework in which intellectual challenges to Marxism can be identified by the degree of difference they engender from a fundamentalist reading of Marx. Degrees one through three fall within the realm of Burgis’ own formulation of Marxism; degree four falls outside of it.

There are two related issues of importance to this discussion. First is my claim that moral sensibilities lie at the heart of Marxist affinity, and the potential charge that I might be speaking as a moralizing idealist. I’m OK with that, and it doesn’t necessarily call for a change in Burgis’ program, even if factual.

But the second runs right up against this discussion – a willingness to challenge historical materialism. Historical materialism, of course, is not without its definitional challenges, but let’s at least assume that it has something to do with the idea contained in the quote Burgis provides from Marx’ A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, that social conditions determine consciousness. This is quite a profound claim. I can’t say it’s necessarily wrong, and I can’t say it’s necessarily right, without a leap of faith.

Certainly, it seems reasonable that elements of capitalism come to bear on elements of consciousness in profound ways. But if we’re willing to take a scientific approach, we have to be willing to test this assumption and modify or reject our current thinking about it based on the data we find.  And that might be beyond the pale of the third degree.

Perhaps it’s time to focus on what unites different strains of Marxism, rather than pitch one model of Marxism against another, and build from there. Flowers for Marx certainly helps do exactly that with its honest, thorough and respectful (even if at times testy) discourse.

Finally, consider the famous words of statistician and master of the probabilistic model George Box – all models are wrong, but some are useful. McManus, Burgis, and Hamilton all have erroneous models of the world, and I certainly don’t claim to have a better one. The best I can do is offer the advice Jenkins gave – when your model is wrong, be prepared to change it.

Footnotes and References

1.       Special thank-you to John M. (Jack) Bunch for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

2.       Althusser’s work comes to bear on discussions of Marx and science throughout Flowers for Marx, as it perhaps should. I have purposefully left discussion of Althusser out of this essay, as it is not my intention to provide a critique of any philosophy of science, but rather to consider the issues of Marx and science from the perspective of the current practice of science.

3.       Card-carrying Lacanians will sometimes protest the roping-in of Lacan as a “model of mind” or psychology, but it’s never been clear to me why, other than “Lacan said it wasn’t.” It certainly functions as exactly that.

4.       For example, this recent Pew study, although there are lots of individual studies, as well as books referencing them, such as Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter.

5.       Simon, Herbert A. (1980). Cognitive science: The newest science of the artificial https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0364021381800031.

6.       Jenkins, J. J. (1974). Remember that old theory of memory? Well, forget it. American Psychologist, 29(11), 785–795. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0037399

7.       Burgis, Ben (2025). Abstractionism, Reductionism and Class-First Politics. Everyday Analysis, 5 June 2025. https://www.everydayanalysis.co.uk/post/abstractionism-reductionism-and-class-first-politics

8.       Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

9.       Lakoff’s books and publications are listed at https://george-lakoff.com/. Specifically, his ideas on framing, conceptual metaphors, and politics are discussed in the popular press book, Don’t Think Like an Elephant.

10.  While there are a number of essays and other writings by Lippman to which one might refer regarding this issue, Lippmann’s 1925 book The Phantom Public is perhaps the single most direct.

11.  Moeller, Hans-Georg & Ambrosio, P. J. (2021) You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity, Columbia University Press.

12.  An example investigation of empirical studies on the effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy is de Maat, S., de Jonghe, F. Schoevers, R. & Dekker, Jack (2009). The Effectiveness of Long-Term Psychoanalytic Therapy: A Systematic Review of Empirical Studies, Harvard Review of Psychiatry 17(1):p 1-23, January 2009. | DOI: 10.1080/10673220902742476

13.   McGowan, T. (2022). Enjoyment Right & Left. Sublation Media, LLC.

14.  Adlai Stephenson quote. sm, 

15.  MacIntyre, Aladair. Marxism and Christianity, Notre Dame Press.

16.  Hatemi, Pete. List of publications, many of which come to bear directly on the issue of individual differences and political affinity. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Ci8Ix08AAAAJ&hl=en

17.  Haidt, Jonathon. Haidt’s work comes to bear on this discussion in several ways, but I’ve limited the discussion here to his basic findings regarding individual predispositions. His research team has a Web site, http://MoralFindations.org, with all the details.

About the Author

John Milton Bunch studied cognitive and neural sciences, instructional technology and learning at the University of South Florida in the 1990’s, earning a PhD. He retired from a career in corporate training and consulting, and now writes on topics he finds interesting, such as political theory, art and media. But mostly he’s a husband and father.