The value of speculation

In the Feuerbach chapter of the German Ideology Marx and Engels take a strong stand against the speculative character of idealism, until at one point revolutionary zeal gets the best of them and they write:

Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place.

Being so strongly influenced by the thought of Adorno, you might imagine I find this formulation hard to stomach. Adorno was without a doubt right when he saw exactly this phenomenon: a clear-cut demarcation between speculation and praxis as the essence of idealism and of capitalist ideology: "Reason," Kant instructs us, "about anything you like and as much as you like, just obey!" But we have to ask the question how close this demarcation between speculation and positive science, or between philosophy and science, as Althusser had put it, is to Marx' own intellectual work. Can the demarcation between speculation and science really be drawn so clearly as Althusser proposes with his hypothesis of the epistemic cut? I would argue that it can not, not only with Marx, but with critical science as a whole.

Let us leave Marx aside for a moment and turn to Marcuse and his notion of utopia. He rejects the notion that socialism is an utopia in the sense of something that can not be manifested:

The other group of projects, where the impossibility is due to the absence of subjective and objective factors, can at best be designated only as "provisionally" unfeasible. Karl Mannheim's criteria for the unfeasibility of such projects, for instance, are inadequate for the very simple reason, to begin with, that unfeasibility shows itself only after the fact. And it is not surprising that a project for social transformation is designated unfeasible because it has shown itself unrealized in history.

Since, as Marcuse points out, the feasibility of projects for social transformation can only be shown "after the fact", hence it is impossible to fully exorcise speculation from critical science, that is science that aims at a substantial transformation of social reality.

Now let us turn to Marx and two central concepts of his theory, that is value and class. The fact that these two concepts are speculative might quite easily elude us . In chapter one of Capital Marx builds his theory of value and he states that the value of a commodity is defined by the amount of abstract human labour involved in its production plus the value that has been transmitted from the means of production. Is this value an empirically verifiable phenomenon? No, it is not. Value is not the same as price, since price can vary according to supply and demand, while value is indifferent to them. Value is rather the long-term tendency that price revolves around, but in itself it is not an empirical concept. The same holds for his concept of social class. The distinction between class for itself and class in itself is exactly the difference between a latent, only potentially existing class, and a manifest, empirically existing class. When writing about class Marx went even further, not only must people realize this latent class, but they must also take into account developmental tendencies of capitalism. The - obviously far fetched - political demand was for the petite bourgeoisie, peasants, lumpenproletariat, etc. to identify with the proletarian struggle for a classless society since all these classes will inevitably become proletarians themselves if capitalism is allowed to continue.