Marx and natural science

When Immanuel Wallerstein gave a talk titled "The heritage of sociology. The promise of social sciences," he identified six "challenges" to the traditional thinking of the social sciences. The fourth of them, so Wallerstein, stems from the natural sciences, specifically from the chemist Ilya Prigogine, who claimed that Newtonian physics had a limited applicability, it was applicable only to integrable systems, which are an exception among existing systems. In The end of certainty Prigogine claimed that most systems include "deterministic processes (between bifurcations) as well as probabilistic systems (in the choice of branches)".

What does this imply for one of the central postulates of Marxism, namely that "all of history is the history of class struggle." At first glance this would imply a completely deterministic social system, functioning according to objective laws. A second glance, especially one informed by the aforementioned "challenge", helps us to interpret Marx in a more productive way. If we were to accept that all history is the product of the dialectics between relationships and means of production, what would that imply for Marx' own intervention? Would it not mean that it was according to its own postulates futile, a mere reflection of the real base of society, which itself functions according to its inherent internal laws, unperturbed by the phantoms spooking the superstructure? Marx was of course not so naive to blindly saw off the branch he was sitting on, his intention was far more ambitious: the whole tree had to go, because it is - if we paraphrase Hölderlin - obscuring the young blossoming life underneath. The distinction between deterministic and probabilistic systems can help us to distinguish two types of history. One is the history of "business as usual", when a certain mode of production is dominant and a ruling class successfully maintains its hegemony. These stages of history can be analysed with a reference to the laws of class struggle. These are the stages between bifurcations. But there are also points when deterministic laws are not applicable, these are the moments of revolutions. The outcomes of revolutions are not arbitrary, or as Marx put it at the beginning of the Eighteenth brumaire: "People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, not under self-selected circumstances, but under found, given and inherited circumstances." The important point though is that people do make their own history, that is, the outcome of revolutionary upheavals is not determined by the laws of history. Adorno seized upon the implications of this fact in Minima Moralia 100 - Sur l'eau: "As the inevitable question [of how an emancipated society would look like] is illegitimate, so is the answer inevitably repulsive and arrogant". The question is illegitimate precisely because the outcome of revolutionary upheavals is not determined, but springs from freedom. This freedom at once implies that the choice for a return to slavery is always a viable outcome of emancipation. A determined emancipation is no emancipation at all.