Kuhn, and Marx’s Model of Scientific Practice

by P.K. Gandakin

January 6, 2025

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) was a revolution in popular thinking. This book on the nature and patterns of scientific research reached an audience far exceeding the size Kuhn initially expected and penetrated into a number of fields outside those initially intended. The book “gave enormous impetus to sociological studies of science” but, more than that, was an integral part of the trend in late twentieth-century philosophy critical of objective Truth, correspondence theory, etc. (although Kuhn’s own relation to these trends are not without tension). [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Preface, xxxv-xxxvi.] The book challenged the traditional notion of science and ‘the scientific method’ as a process of steady collection of straightforward facts leading to increasingly closer approximations of the external world. Instead, Kuhn–by in-depth analysis of the actual history of scientific research–shows that scientific progress is defined by radical acts of creativity on the part of individual scientists, discontinuity, and defined by an attachment to subjective and contingent conceptual schemes rather than objective knowledge about reality. 

This “relativistic” trend is of interest to this essay, but partially so because it is an object of interest for contemporary Marxism as well. It is almost as if a hypothetical reader could pick up any modern text, theoretical, practical, magazine, academic, etc., written by a communist, and find a mention of “postmodernism” and “bourgeois relativism” as the sources of Marxism’s current intellectual incapacity. If only the hurdle were so easy to overcome!—if only all that stood between us and long-awaited revolution was a universal proclamation of fidelity towards “science,” “objectivity,” and—most notorious of all—“material reality.” Unfortunately, the notion that a set of academics, no matter how clever or eloquent they might be, are somehow meaningfully responsible for putting world history on pause—is rather silly. And, as we shall see in this article, the much-maligned concepts of relativism and subjectivity are not novel introductions by either French theorists or American pragmatists but are clear and consistent themes within Marx and the communist canon as well.

A specific analysis of these trends is not the subject of this essay, although certain representatives of it, such as Richard Rorty, are influential for, and discussed elsewhere in, this magazine. For us, Kuhn provides a wealth of concepts and indications that serve our purpose. His most important concept is of the “paradigms” that structure scientific practice. Paradigms are , the set of informal background beliefs possessed by a scientist that act as an implicit framework for their  research. Importantly, paradigms define not just the theory a scientist has, but the way in which he cognizes his scientific practice. Whether a scientist is working with ‘oxygen’ or ‘phlogiston’ depends, ultimately, on the training they were given as a scientist rather than the object they’re researching. With these concepts, Kuhn provides us a starting-point from which we can begin to conceptualize communism in a way that breaks with traditional, objectivist and ossified versions of Marxism. With paradigms in mind, we will look at the classic formulation of base/superstructure and examine its expressions, limitations, and flaws. We will also ask in what sense it can be understood to have historical validity. Ultimately, however, the critique of the base/superstructure model will be to set up a closer analysis of Marx’s theory of theoretical practice. 

This may seem like an extensive undertaking, and it is difficult to claim that this essay treats the topic with the sufficient intensity it deserves, not least due to limitations of length, the need for readability and, as is necessarily the case, awkwardness concomitant to new formulations. Nevertheless, internally, at least, it has provided a valuable impetus for further research and practice, and possibly indicates new areas of development for Marxist theory in the present moment, even if not daring to—actively refusing to—conclusively provide a final “answer.”

I. System and Anti-System (or, Dialectics)

From a theoretical standpoint, Marxism is usually treated as having or being a systematic theory of capitalism and historical change. It has a number of categories (proletariat and bourgeoisie, labor and capital, value and surplus-value, etc.), clearly delineated relationships between these categories and explicit theories of their development, and conclusions about the ultimate end-results of the developments of those relations. Marxism is a complete science; and the history of Marxist politics is the history of its application(or perhaps its articulation) but always in the form of a correction to the limited historical vision of prior theorists or contingent ‘flaws’ in their understanding. 

This conception of Marxism (recently described by Michael Heinrich as “world-view Marxism”) believes that Marxism has found the solution to the mystery of human history once and for all. It claims that this insight extends beyond history or politics and, although not always, to fields customarily treated as independent, such as the physical sciences, aesthetic criticism, etc. Take as emblematic here the following quote from Lenin’s The Three Sources and Components of Marxism: 

The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defense of bourgeois oppression. 

In my opinion, this tendency is better visualized as an attitude rather than a strictly defined theory: one that believes Marxism is absolutely ‘true’ and contains already all that is necessary for revolutionary practice and that, in contrast, ‘bourgeois’ theory is the source of illusions and false consciousness., and hence the obstacle to the truth of Marxist theory. Consequently, Marxist theory categorizes events and ideologies as either progressive and revolutionary or reactionary and counter-revolutionary, determined by the degree of correspondence these events have with other events already formalized within theory or describable with its terms. 

In contrast to this systematic view is Marxism understood as an anti-systematic (alternatively: anti-metaphysical, or dialectical) theory. example, in probably the most superficially “systematic” book the pair published, Anti-Duhring, Engels cautions at the outset against understanding the work’s extension of topic as indicating development of yet another systematic theory. Instead, Engels disparages this systematizing tendency in the book’s first Preface, writing: 

For some time now in Germany systems of cosmogony, of philosophy of nature in general, of politics, of economics, etc., have been springing up by the dozen overnight, like mushrooms. The most insignificant doctor philosophiae and even a student will not go in for anything less than a complete “system”.

In Anti-Duhring, Engels analyzes a staggeringly large swathe of fields ranging from natural science to politics to philosophy. But he insists that his own breadth is only a consequence of the necessity of responding to the object of his critique, the theories of Professor Duhring, who does present his theory in the form of a system. Hence, despite the expansive subject matter he takes under consideration, Engels insists that Anti-Duhring “cannot in any way aim at presenting another system as an alternative to Herr Dühring’s “system.”” Engels is not presenting a complete and holistic ‘theory of everything,’ but only attempting to “follow” Dühring with the weapon of criticism into whatever intellectual hole he himself initially burrows. 

This anti-systematic attitude, however, has reverberations throughout the rest of Marx and Engels’ approach to their theoretical work. Not only does Engels reject the completeness of system but, more than that, he is pushed to ground this anti-systematic attitude by virtue of an epistemology (a theory of knowledge) that emphasizes the essential limitedness of human thought. In the chapter entitled “Morality and Law. Eternal Truths,” Engels raises “the question whether any, and if so which, products of human knowledge ever can have sovereign validity and an unconditional claim to truth.”  His answer is unequivocal:

…we all know that there can be no talk of such a thing, and that all previous experience shows that without exception such knowledge always contains much more that is capable of being improved upon than that which cannot be improved upon, or is correct.

This means that, by his own standard, Engels’ conclusions and criticisms do not represent absolute truths or unambiguous facts but merely what he is able to assert within the limits of his historical and particular subjective position. Nor is this limited to the fields of political theory and philosophy. Writing on mathematics, for example, Engels says:

With the introduction of variable magnitudes and the extension of their variability to the infinitely small and infinitely large, mathematics, usually so strictly ethical, fell from grace; it ate of the tree of knowledge, which opened up to it a career of most colossal achievements, but at the same time a path of error. The virgin state of absolute validity and irrefutable proof of everything mathematical was gone for ever; the realm of controversy was inaugurated, and we have reached the point where most people differentiate and integrate not because they understand what they are doing but from pure faith, because up to now it has always come out right.

Here, what is key is not merely the otherwise “banal” statement on the limits of knowledge but also early prefigurations of a pragmatic theory of knowledge. For Engels, truth in practice is not absolute and does not correspond to an external reality, but is solely adopted because it ‘works,’ ‘helps us cope,’ i.e., has, so far, “always come out right.”

This latter aspect is key because it points away from a reading of Engels as a pure relativist. Engels does not believe ‘anything goes,’ and the word ‘relative’ is, for him, not a synonym for arbitrary or wanton. Engels writes:

…the sovereignty of thought is realized in a series of extremely unsovereignly-thinking human beings; the knowledge which has an unconditional claim to truth is realized in a series of relative errors; neither the one nor the other can be fully realized except through an unending duration of human existence.

Human knowledge is not ‘absolute,’ but neither is it purely capricious or arbitrary. Thought is a “series of relative errors” that have a clear test for their adoption—whether they so far have “come out right”. what appears to be under attack is not the validity of knowledge but the notion of knowledge as an accumulation of objective and scientific truths. Absolute truth is perfect, complete, and final, whereas “unsovereignly-thinking human beings” are limited, partial, and existing, i.e., precluded from finality in breadth of scope and precision in representation. Knowledge is not merely repudiated, but it is no longer objective, and instead, it is defined by its position in subjective (but not willful or wanton) practice. 

Moving away from explicit theories of knowledge, it becomes clear that an approach that emphasizes epistemological fallibilism is also key to Marx and Engels’ larger theory of communism. Consider, f.e., Marx’s famous refusal to write “recipes[…] for the cook-shops of the future,” his insistence that his Capital was not a theory of capitalist development in general but specifically confined to an analysis of the conditions of the development of English capitalism in particular, or his well-known quote that:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Clearly, an element of ambiguity and limitedness is not only part of Marx’s philosophy, but part of Marxist political analysis, as well. A refusal to write “recipes” for the future is not a product of intellectual humility, but a recognition of the necessary obscurity of the historical change, which is obscure because revolutionary processes do not only overthrow states or revolutionize modes of production but, at the same time, also thoroughly transform our knowledge and understanding.

Lenin’s Three Sources, written in 1913, has, because of Heinrich’s usage of the work as an example of “world-view Marxism,” acquired notoriety as an exemplar of metaphysical thinking. But Lenin’s thinking is not adequately represented by the Three Sources alone, which is a short, popular text with little real import from the perspective of intellectual biography. Lenin, throughout his life, was intimately familiar with this ‘pragmatic’ and relativistic approach to human knowledge and practice. Take, for example, his most extensive work on philosophy, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Superficially a hyper-dogmatic paean to the worst forms of vulgar and objectivist Marxism, a close reading quickly reveals that Lenin is well aware of the contradictions within the materialist theory of knowledge, and actually, in response, takes a critical position similar to Marx and Engels’. In it, he writes:

…for the materialist, the world is richer, livelier, more varied than it actually seems, for with each step in the development of science new aspects are discovered. For the materialist, sensations are images of the ultimate and sole objective reality, ultimate not in the sense that it has already been explored to the end, but in the sense that there is not and cannot be any other.

Here, a division is drawn between external reality as ‘ultimate’ in the sense of our comprehension of it being final, and ‘ultimate’ in the sense that it is always the sole object of practice. In the former sense, our knowledge of the external world is understood as absolute, and hence ‘materialism’ as physicalism, or as objectivism, is validated. ‘Ultimate’ is an affirming term: science, reason, and analysis have uncovered laws of nature that operate with a necessity in antagonism to our subjective and voluntary aspirations. In the latter sense, however, ‘ultimate’ is a limiting term. Lenin writes:

[…] dialectical materialism insists on the approximate, relative character of every scientific theory of the structure of matter and its properties.

In other words, ‘objective reality’ is ultimate not because scientific practice uncovers inviolable objective structures but because—no matter how extensive or developed our knowledge may be— these objective structures are always subjectively articulated and contingent theories of objective structures and, consequently, repeatedly displaced by actual objective reality as a power independent of the intellect and which cannot be wholly grasped by particular, individual man. Lenin writes:

The materialist dialectics of Marx and Engels certainly does contain relativism, but is not reducible to relativism, that is, it recognizes the relativity of all our knowledge, not in the sense of the denial of objective truth, but in the sense of the historically conditional nature of the limits of the approximation of our knowledge of this truth.

This, rather than any emphasis on a causal power of ‘economic’ or ‘real’ factor, is the essence of the materialism of dialectical materialist philosophy. 

Further, without conceiving ‘ultimate’ as a limiting rather than affirming term, various other statements by Lenin are unclear and irreconcilable with the rest of his theory. Take, for example, the claim that Lenin utilizes a correspondence theory of knowledge that understands knowledge as the verification (or falsification) of ideas through implementation or ‘practice.’ This seems incompatible with a theory of knowledge as essentially relative. Yet Lenin insists that “the criterion of practice can never, in the nature of things, either confirm or refute any human idea completely.”

The problem with the above interpretation is that it glosses over countless statements by Lenin in and outside Materialism that directly contradict it. After all, the question of the “criterion of practice” only arises because it is introduced by Lenin, in the same chapter just quoted from, as the correct way of understanding the materialist theory of knowledge. Let alone Lenin’s innumerable and explicit positive references to objective truth, verification, correspondence, and other strongly anti-relativistic epistemologies that reject the conclusions so far elaborated. 

If it is possible to avoid submitting that these contradictions are all due to error, however, there might be gleaned from Lenin’s philosophical thought a key insight into communist theory. In Materialism, Lenin writes:

The mastery of nature manifested in human practice is a result of an objectively correct reflection within the human head of the phenomena and processes of nature, and is proof of the fact that this reflection (within the limits of what is revealed by practice) is objective, absolute, and eternal truth. (192) [my emphasis]

Stare too long at it and this sentence is likely to make even the most flexible dialectician’s head spin. For, how is it possible for “reflection” (i.e., intellectual representation) to be “objective, absolute, and eternal” while, at the same time, for it to be “within the limits” of anything—which would indicate that those reflections are prima facie not either objective, absolute, or eternal? And how is Lenin comfortable with separating this statement of absolute truth from a clause that limits it—by merely a single word?

Here is, in outline, the guiding thesis of this work and, I contend, a central part of the communist theory of theory more generally. Materialism must be either interpreted as the work of a philosophical amateur, or of an inconsistent thinker. The latter is precisely what Lenin—along with Marx, Engels, and many others—was. The contradiction in Materialism is partially due to errors and limitations in Lenin’s own thought, butprimarily, due to the fact that the object under investigation itself, human practice, is essentially characterized by contradiction. Contradiction here must be understood in the fullest sense, i.e., not merely conflict, antagonism, or opposition between independent objects, but full-throated paradox and logical incompatibility—and yet, presence of the paradox in actuality, and so the actuality of the contradiction. And here we can see that the dialectic of Marxist philosophy is not the Socratic dialectic, but the aporia that results from it; not the monistic stillness advocated by Parmenides, but the paradox of motion elucidated by his disciple Zeno. 

Marxism consequently appears as a theory that is not closed but radically incomplete and open. It does not claim—as various modern ‘representative’ tendencies today do—that it has, once and for all, ‘scientifically’ or ‘objectively’ ‘proven’ any given thesis. In other words, it is structurally open: the key to the dialectical materialist outlook is that the limited character of knowledge is not superseded through practice or history but that its limited character is an essential aspect of human existence. No matter how much these various ‘objectivist’ and ‘scientific’ tendencies claim to be radically opposed to bourgeois thought they, in practice, reaffirm the most basic propositions of liberalism, viz., the centrality of the concept of rational argumentation, the essence of man as homo economicus, the unity of industrial and moral progress, etc., with more fervor and enthusiasm than liberalism itself does. Marxism, however, is a rupture with liberalism and bourgeois ideology. In lieu of absolute reason, generalized in the world by the leveling power of the market, it asserts an epistemological gap: radical emptiness, paradox, ambiguity; an absolute rejection of alienation and the imposition of (economic) logic and (social-political) domination over an existence that cannot be contained in intellectual categories; and it asserts, as the positivization of this gap, radical and creative human practice, which not only produces in the ‘external world’ but also, as the nature of man is itself tied to the 'external world’ and man’s practice, the ‘internal world,’ or understanding, itself. The question remains of the dimensions of this gap and its relation to practice and theory.

II. Thomas S. Kuhn’s Paradigms

Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has already been discussed briefly in the introduction. In it, he sets out his concept of a scientific “paradigm.” Kuhn argues against the traditional objectivist view of science that views it as a process of neutral accumulation of scientific truths over time (usually according to some ideal “scientific method”). He claims, to the contrary, that there has never been a single “method” to science. Rather, every particular researcher enters his field with a preexisting worldview and set of beliefs that define his scientific practice, inculcated by formal education and the attached “textbook” tradition. Kuhn’s intervention is co-present with the pragmatic intervention in philosophy, led by philosophers like Quine and Sellars, and, closer to his own field, individuals like the historian/philosopher of science Paul Feyeraband.

The essential thrust of this intervention is the undermining of the philosophical and rationalist framework inaugurated by Descartes that attempted to locate a trans-historical truth in certain types of objects (i.e., pure reason or empirical sensation) which would serve as an uncontested ground for the validity of our knowledge. In contrast to this view, thinkers like Kuhn proposed that the objects we consider to be transmitted to us without mediation (whether empirical or rational in nature) are actually structured by particular conceptual schemas rather than given by an immediately cognizable and unchanging external reality (note, importantly, that this is not equivalent to a denial of the existence of an external reality). Unlike Kant, whose transcendental epistemology made a similar claim, that a priori categories (such as time, space, causality, and so on) derived from reason structured possible experience, Kuhn instead argues these conceptual schemes are actually contingent and historically constructed. Rather than simply deriving from the application of reason or the analysis of sensations, they themselves played a role in constructing what constitutes reason and sensation, what a particular sensation ‘is,’ what forms of argumentation are considered valid, and so on. Richard Rorty, a pragmatic philosopher following the footsteps of this intervention, describes it as follows: 

Feyeraband, like Kuhn, was concerned to show that the meaning of lots of statements in the language, including lots of “observation” statements, got changed when a new theory came along: or, at least, that granting that such change took place made more sense of the facts of the history of science than the standard textbook view which kept meanings constant and let only beliefs change. (270).

[…]

This contact [of “objective reference” by language to the objects of the external world…] seemed to give science what was lacking in religion and politics—the ability to use contact with the real as the touchstone of truth. The horror which greeted Quine’s overthrow of the dogmas [of essentialism and neutral observational reports], and Kuhn’s and Feyeraband’s examples of the “theory-ladenness” of observation [i.e., that perceived objects were already partially constituted by theory prior to our awareness of them], was a result of the fear that there might be no such touchstone.

In other words, the intervention marked an attempt to break with the centuries-long philosophical quest for ‘ultimate’ truths whose ground could not be put into question. In it, not only were the particular theories of the Western philosophical canon challenged, but the validity of its terms as well. The idea that historical man was capable of accessing a trans-historical reason or unchanging, secure sensations was itself called into doubt—and emphasis was laid instead on the limits of human knowledge to acquire absolute truth through philosophical contemplation, just like Lenin above.

In The Structure, Kuhn contributes to this project in the field of the philosophy of science. Using the word “paradigm” to describe the preexisting worldviews and beliefs that structure a practitioner’s approach to scientific work, he describes these paradigms as follows: 

Successive paradigms tell us different things about the population of the universe and about that population’s behavior. They differ, that is, about such questions as the existence of subatomic particles, the materiality of light, and the conservation of heat or of energy. These are the substantive differences between successive paradigms […] But paradigms differ in more than substance, for they are directed not only to nature but also back upon the science that produced them. They are the sources of the methods, problem-field, and standards of solution accepted by any mature scientific community at any given time. As a result, the reception of a new paradigm often necessitates a redefinition of the corresponding science. (103)

These paradigms, learnt in the classroom, become the scientists’ ways of viewing the world. They determine what his objects (or “population”) are, his “methods,” and what is considered a correct or incorrect “solution.” This means that, contrary to intuition, they determine what is actually ‘observed’ as an object: what, for example, was observed as an “epicycle” under Ptolemaic astronomy is, after Kepler, seen instead as elliptical orbits. The factual stimuli in a certain sense remains the same, but the factual data, i.e., the actual objects we identify when presented with stimuli, is, under different theories, not only given different meanings but is actually a different set of objects altogether. 

For Kuhn, these paradigms change throughout history through revolutions that replace one with another, not via evolution of one into another through progression of research. Emblematic is the shift from Newtonian mechanics to Einstein’s relativity, or, the replacement of geocentric theories of the solar system with heliocentric ones by Copernicus. Relativity, or heliocentrism, were not additions to previous theories but ruptures that shattered the worldviews that preceded them. New paradigms do not merely introduce additional concepts to an old one, but actually “change the meaning of established and familiar concepts.” Using the example of Newtonian mechanics and general relativity, we see, for example, that mass, although a common term for both paradigms, in each case means something different. For the former, mass is absolute and conserved, whereas for the latter mass is convertible to energy, and consequently a fundamentally different type of substance. 

With mass, however, confusion can arise due to the fact that the same term is used and merely its qualities are changed. It is unclear that not only the predicates attached to a term but the term itself is modified. There are other more striking, simple examples: Kuhn also compares a change in paradigm to ‘gestalt switch,’ or one of those images that can be seen as two things alternatively without itself changing. (Trendy examples might be of the dress that can be seen as both blue and black and white and gold, or, in audio, the voice clip that can be heard as either “yanny” or “laurel.”) A scientist who undergoes a paradigm shift undergoes a similar effect: at one point he sees one thing; the next, another. While the Aristotelian theory of motion was dominant, for example, an object swinging on a rope was considered as simply “falling with difficulty,” i.e., the rope was seen as inhibiting the ability of the object to come to rest and properly fall, and the entire process was a “constrained falling.” “Galileo, on the other hand, looking at the swinging body, saw a pendulum, a body that almost succeeded in repeating the same motion over and over again ad infinitum” (119). This ‘gestalt switch’ of seeing a pendulum where previous scientists had seen a falling object meant he could analyze physics in new ways, deriving “full and sound arguments for the independence of weight and rate of fall, as well as for the relationship between vertical height and terminal velocity of motions down inclined planes.” However, what is key for us is not the particular scientific innovations made, but that this was genuinely a new way of looking at things. Kuhn writes:

Until that scholastic paradigm was invented, there were no pendulums, but only swinging stones, for the scientist to see. Pendulums were brought into existence by something very like a paradigm-induced gestalt switch. (120)

In other words, the Aristotelians did not observe a pendulum, and then describe it as a “constrained falling,” but did not see a pendulum in the first place. Prior to a new paradigm, scientists, lacking the new paradigm’s novel concepts and its qualitatively different ways of looking at things, lived, at least in some sense, in a substantively different world. Science is not a simple process of accumulation, but a series of mutually incommensurable paradigm shifts, each of which carries their own way of looking at the world.

Gestalt Switch

With this in mind, we can tease out Kuhn’s distinction of paradigms into two senses. A paradigm in the first sense (what he also calls a “disciplinary matrix”) consists of “the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given [scientific] community.” A disciplinary matrix or paradigm, in the first sense, can be seen as a worldview with its own concepts and practices, and is the type of paradigm we have discussed so far. A disciplinary matrix indicates the holistic and objective consequences of the theory of paradigms: an individual’s practice, aims, etc., are all internal to a disciplinary matrix and mediated by it, not purely external, objective, or universal. They structure “the methods, problem-field, and standards of solution” of a particular scientific practice.  Kuhn writes: 

[…] consciously or not, the decision to employ a particular piece of apparatus and to use it in a particular way carries an assumption that only certain sorts of circumstances will arise. There are instrumental as well as theoretical expectations, and they have often played a decisive role in scientific development.

This means, radically, that the history of science “makes one suspect that something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception [in a scientific context] itself.” 

This has significant implications for the theory of the structure of scientific revolutions: because disciplinary matrices are worldviews, rather than merely bodies of collected data or propositional truths, a disciplinary matrix is never produced by a novel factual discovery but is as much a work of theoretical elaboration. While novel factual discoveries, by contradicting existing theoretical assumptions, can play a role in precipitating a crisis of belief in a disciplinary matrix or worldview and encourage the formulation of a new one, they can never be taken as equivalent to the latter. Thinking again of the example of relativity, it is clear that Einstein’s theory cannot be reduced to the empirical data he examined (which existed in the scientific community without leading to relativity prior to Einstein) but, rather, the revolutionary way in which he elaborated an alternative way of viewing and understanding them. The task of a new paradigm is not simply to challenge the pillars of an old paradigm but also to provide a meaningful account for novel factual discoveries, past theoretical redundancies, and other problems that are inaccessible to the “instrumental as well as theoretical expectations” of the previous one. Theoretical work is, in this sense, the real content of a worldview, even if not in the form traditionally understood by the term ‘theoretical work' as meaning purely academic ‘scholastic’ activity.

A paradigm in the second sense (what Kuhn also calls an “exemplar”) refers to an element of the “disciplinary matrix,” namely, particular “models or examples” that “replace explicit rules as a basis for” how to approach problem-solving (174). Exemplars, in contrast to disciplinary matrices, which show us how paradigms function as worldviews, instead point us to the dynamics of how these worldviews actually structure scientific practice. Kuhn rejects the notion that science consists of clear and technical formal propositions or statements that function to provide a logical process that a practitioner merely has to carry out. Scientific practice is not governed by precise rules but relies instead on symbolic experiments or events that a given scientific community finds representative and emblematic. These symbolic events become the mode through which different and novel empirical events are understood. Kuhn writes: 

When I speak of knowledge embedded in shared exemplars […] I have in mind a manner of knowing which is misconstrued if reconstructed in terms of rules that are first abstracted from exemplars and thereafter function in their stead. Or, to put the same point differently, when I speak of acquiring from exemplars the ability to recognize a given situation as like some and unlike others that one has seen before, I am not suggesting a process that is not potentially fully explicable in terms of neuro-cerebral mechanism. Instead I am claiming that the explication will not, by its very nature, answer the question, “Similar with respect to what?” That question is a request for a rule, in this case for the criteria by which particular situations are grouped into similarity sets, and I am arguing that the temptation to seek criteria (or at least a full set) should be resisted in this case. (191).

Exemplars, as the name suggests, operate as guideposts for scientific practice rather than laws or even tendencies. The best way to understand them is probably (and conveniently) through reflection on one’s own use of exemplars: in the same way that, for example, a filmmaker may draw inspiration from her favorite movies to inspire her own, without understanding that source of inspiration as a rigid set of rules, and without attempting to copy it literally, so, too, the scientific practitioner approaches each novel factual discovery through individual creative action influenced by comparison with exemplar rather than simply one-to-one reproduction. 

Kuhn highlights two forms of exemplars in particular: the first, what he calls “symbolic generalizations,” refers to formal scientific laws such as f = ma, or statements such as “action equals reaction” (182). The purpose of a symbolic generalization is not to provide an objective description of reality but “function[] as a tool, informing the student what similarities to look for, [and] signaling the gestalt in which the situation is to be seen.” Consequently, their function is both “inseparabl[y]  legislative and definitional” (id.): they do not only attempt to provide a practically useful definition of reality, but, through the articulation of that definition, as we saw previously when examining worldview more generally, also ‘legislates’ (or structures) the objects and concepts that are present to a scientific practitioner. 

Unlike worldviews, however, the role symbolic generalizations play in structuring scientific practice can be more precisely described. Symbolic generalizations, as exemplars and ‘guide-posts,’ provide an ideal model that a scientific practitioner uses to construct an appropriate homologous model for his particular novel factual situation. Kuhn writes, using the example of f = ma:

As the student or the practicing scientist moves from one problem situation to the next, the symbolic generalization to which such manipulations apply changes. For the case of free fall, f = ma becomes mg = m(d^2s/dt^2); for the simple pendulum it is transformed to mg sin[symbol] = -ml(d^2[symbol]/dt^2) […] and for more complex situations, such as the gyroscope, it takes still other forms, the family resemblance of which to f = ma is still harder to discover. Yet, while learning to identify forces, masses, and accelerations in a variety of physical situations not previously encountered, the student has also learned to design the appropriate version of f = ma through which to interrelate them, often a version for which he has encountered no literal equivalent before.

The inability to exactly apply symbolic generalizations to novel factual situations has immediate consequences for the nature of scientific knowledge and practice. Whereas the notion of science as the neutral accumulation of facts implies training through memorization of as many facts as possible, Kuhn’s notion, in contrast, displaces the role of formal knowledge (without eliminating it entirely). In fact, Kuhn’s notion leads us to a more accurate image of scientific education: rather than engage in sheer memorization, the implications of his theory of symbolic generalizations means that a student cannot get by through textbook study but must supplement study with actual problem-solving, where he learns to “grasp[] the analogy between two or more distinct problems, [and] interrelate symbols and attach them to nature in the ways that have proved effective before” (188). (Perhaps, if we wanted to present this in logically rather than actual-historically, we might say instead that properly speaking it is problem-solving that is actually ‘supplemented’ by textbook study and formal knowledge.)

The second form of exemplars is the actual “previous puzzle-solutions,” or scientific experiments (189). Already, the previous paragraph has indicated how symbolic generalizations and puzzle-solutions basically overlap: symbolic generalizations, as formal knowledge, can be understood as these past experiments presented in condensed and formalized version. By recalling and analogizing past ways that scientific practitioners solved the problems facing them, modern scientists are able to devise, on the spot, their own solutions to new problems.  For us, the distinction here of interest is of form: by understanding both puzzle-solutions and symbolic generalizations as different expressions of exemplars, it becomes clearer how formal knowledge is not self-contained but penetrated through and through with the empirical and the symbolic. Exemplars are not rational propositions or abstract truths, but models for understanding and incorporating data. (Hence, Kuhn prefers to refer to them as a “sketch” or “schema” rather than a law proper(188).) The purpose of a symbolic generalization is not to describe reality but to equip a scientist with the tools necessary to progress in his venture. Hence we can understand the claim that scientific practice is not merely a carrying out of rules but involves a ‘creative’ role on the part of the scientific practitioner himself, who must somehow make a leap and reconcile the schema with the novel data, even if he is not aware that that is what he is doing in practice. 

With this opening description, it is possible to begin to examine the consequences of Kuhn’s approach as it applies to our object of interest, the theory of practice (praxis), albeit without moving past Kuhn quite yet. Kuhn argues exemplars are the most novel and controversial of his theses, and it easy to understand why: the relationship between exemplars and worldviews is essentially obscure; how, exactly, exemplars structure worldviews is ambiguous, although clearly informal and in a significant sense abstract. Perhaps a better word would be strange. In any case, the strangeness of exemplars opens a window into the strangeness of science more generally, and further allows us to locate the origin of this strangeness in (scientific) practice. The lack of congruency between the formalized rules of a science and scientific practice itself—the former being closed and determinative, the latter being open and essentially creative, insofar as it involves both the discovery of novel empirical facts that challenge the assumptions of the rules and sui generis articulations of the rules in situations where do they do not fully apply—indicates that scientific practice as a totality is itself “anti-systematic,” or dialectical, in its structure.

This can be re-stated as follows. Paradigms, as worldviews, provide both the origin of scientific practice and determine its content. At the same time, the structure of paradigms in the form of metaphorical exemplars means that this determination is always inexact: no matter what paradigm one uses to ‘see,’ the individual always sees something else, something novel that stands in tension with the paradigm through which he sees it and requires assimilation to the model; consequently, he is always being forced to expand and develop the paradigm and is thrust perpetually forward. He is never able to achieve a complete scientific system in which he can remain at rest, but in addition to collecting empirical data, he must, at the same time, engage in more or less intense and more or less conscious theoretical elaboration. While the theory of exemplars is supposed to provide a positive structure to worldview, extended consistently, such theory undermines the efficacy of worldviews as actually holistic and stable conceptual schemes.

The resulting tension between worldview and exemplar becomes characteristic of scientific practice itself. It means that scientific practice, strictly speaking, is neither a collection of truths nor a means to understand the world. Insofar as this tension is characteristic, it indeed seems to function as the complete opposite of this image: it appears to be a problem-creating or problematizing practice. The actuality of a paradigm or the utilization of an exemplar only occurs in a moment where that paradigm or exemplar is set against something that is not immediately assimilable to it. This problematizing function as the main function of scientific practice means that such practice displaces aspirations towards the unambiguous collection of objective and final truths, answers, or accurate models, and, importantly, indicates that the structure of scientific practice as problematizing is essentially ruptural: conceptual schemes, rather than structuring practice, are, through that very same practice, “stretched” to their limit and ultimately forced into a crisis that demands new articulation and their replacement. 

Further, it undermines the idea that science is an accretionary process that provides through its development ever-more accurate and comprehensive descriptions of nature. This can be shown by the way in which scientific revolutions in worldviews themselves proceed. Kuhn writes that “no process yet disclosed by there historical study of scientific development at all resembles the methodological stereotype of falsification,” and this appears to be valid. The models of nature historically replaced by new ones were rarely proven wrong but, often, were actually able to explain and classify a much wider host of phenomena than the theories that followed them. Ptolemaic astronomy, for example, was able to explain far more about the orbit of the planets with its theory of epicycles than Kepler’s elliptical orbits when the latter was first formulated and replaced it; and the general theory of relativity required much time and elaboration before it could rival the explanatory power of Newtonian mechanics. In fact, it seems that only in the rarest cases can a rival theory or worldview be ‘disproved.’ Kuhn writes:

By themselves [anomalies or counterinstances] cannot and will not falsify that philosophical theory, for its defenders will do what we have already seen scientists doing when confronted by anomaly. They will devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict. Many of the relevant modifications and qualifications are, in fact, already in the literature. (78)

Or, more sharply put: “there are always some discrepancies.” (81). Neither is the necessary presence of anomalies that require correction an unfortunate pill to swallow. Rather, again, they are central to what science is. As Kuhn argues, “it is just the incompleteness and imperfection of the existing data-theory fit that, at any time, define many of the puzzles that characterize normal science.” (146). If theory and data coincided, then there would be no scientific practice at all, and the subject under discussion would be purely technical and without controversy (i.e., as Kuhn puts it, it would “cease to yield research problems at all and [] instead become tools for engineering” 79).

This tension is not merely a problem to be solved or a failure of science but constitutive of scientific practice. To summarize, stripped of much of Kuhn’s particular language and scientific specificity and intermixed with the interpretations so far elaborated along with our communistic terminology, we can provisionally state in brief the results of this examination as follows: 

1. Kuhn presents us with the concept of worldview, which encompasses not just the attitudes we have towards the objects of our world but also our understanding of what those objects and their laws are for our perception. 

2. Kuhn’s examination of the relationship between a worldview and practice indicates that this relationship is characterized by strangeness; a practicing subject both depends on a worldview and various exemplars to structure his practice while, at the same time, is continually forced into tension with that very same worldview when she continuously confronts novel events in the carrying out of that practice. 

3. The result of this tension is that neither practice nor worldview is ever ‘final’ but always in a process of development in the form of a constant succession of problem events.

4. Finally, these worldviews replace one another after both the presence of crisis as anomalies in the worldview’s ability to adequately structure the practice and after the successful articulation of an alternative worldview that more effectively structures future practice, and never due to the presence of either on their own. 

These basic ideas will guide our examination of Marxism and the Marxist concept of ideology.

III. Base and Superstructure

A. Description: What is the B/S Model?

Beginning a study of Marxist theory with the base/superstructure (B/S) model has numerous benefits. As a highly simplified form of the theory of historical materialism, it is easily accessible and often functions as the starting point and genetic structure of more complex Marxist theories. Further, as an openly didactic tool, criticism is less morally wounding than it otherwise might be if directed to other aspects of Marxist theory. Also importantly, despite its apparently only didactic utility, it is nevertheless internalized by many as an essentially correct understanding of historical materialism. But beyond any of these largely agreeable considerations, the main purpose behind focusing on the B/S model is that it is clearly homologous to the other problematic divisions that characterize the intellectual history of Marxism, viz., those between theory/practice, economics/politics, dialectical/historical materialism, and the abstract/concrete.

Put simply, the B/S model is a shorthand for the traditional Marxist method of social analysis. It divides society into two: the first and primary side is the base, or the economic structure of a given mode of production. ‘Economic structure’ has been given a variety of senses and constructions throughout history, but in its most pared-down sense it is basically intuitive. The economic structure consists of the economic relations that result from the combination of the technical conditions of the productive forces (i.e., the tools of production) and the characteristics of a particular mode of production. For capitalism, for example, the base might consist of the collective social organization of productive labor imposed by the necessity of operating large industrial factories, wherein individual craft is replaced by the mechanical and rote ‘line’ work. Additionally considered are the relations of capitalism itself, such as that of surplus-value extraction between a capitalist and the worker who he employs, the relation of competition between different independent capitalists, and so on and so forth. This model is further understood as being generally applicable: in feudal society, for example, the base might consist of the limits imposed by a lower level of technology and of the relations of exploitation specific to a peasant tied to a parcel of land and that land’s lord.

The secondary side of the division is the superstructure, which consists of, broadly understood, what might be termed the ideal. This means that the superstructure consists of subjective understandings (or ideology), the legal and formal expressions of the relations of the base (i.e., the legal system and statuses of property and labor rather than the ‘brute fact’ of private property and exploitation itself), the structure of the state and the politics of the parties and groups that compete to capture it—basically, existence other than the structure of economic production. As the secondary aspect of this model, it is determined originally by the economic structure. Although Marx never explicitly used the B/S model in so many words, it can more or less be extracted in some sense from his works. In his famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, for example, he provides the model’s critical definitional passage in describing his general theory of historical development. He writes:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

In its most extreme and schematic forms, this means that the B/S model understands the superstructure (again, the state, politics, ideology, etc.) as ultimately reducible to economic production or, further, even the productive forces and their technical conditions. In this vein is Marx’s notorious formulation of historical materialism as the view that “the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.”

A characteristic example of the application of this model is the problem of the racialization of labor. White supremacy within the working class as an ideology belongs to the superstructure, and from this follows the leftist slogan depicted below (“Black and White Workers Unite”) that attempts to challenge this superstructural representation through an appeal to economic solidarity that transcends racial-ideological division. Even the standard critical response to this position as overly reductive reproduces the economic reductionism of the original model: against attempts to paper over the brutality of white supremacy via appeal to the ‘primary’ economic, it is retorted that the economic exploitation of non-white labor is usually extreme (both qualitatively and quantitatively) and that the white working class benefits from this hyper-exploitation through access to higher standards of living (i.e., strictly in the terms of the ‘base,’ a larger proportional share of value produced).

Propaganda Poster

The point of this objection is to affirm that racial oppression (and hence race-based divisions within the working class) is, actually, grounded ‘materially’ in the base, rather than being superstructural. While this isn’t a remarkable claim in itself—it is only natural that oppression that occurs at the political or cultural level also occurs at the economic level—the intention is implicitly that the grievances of non-white labor against racial oppression are thereby more justified, even more ‘real’ than it otherwise would be because primarily of the economic dynamic involved (as opposed to ‘idealisms’ that treat economic exploitation as only one level, occasionally even a marginal one, of oppression, i.e., liberalism’s ‘identity politics,’ or radical theories that consider racial oppression as being itself a relation in society that cannot be reduced to any lower or more essential level, such as those that characterized many of the ideologies of the 20th century American Black liberation movements or, more currently, theories such as Afro-Pessimism). Irrespective of the particular merits of either side of this intra-economistic debate, the commonality puts in sharp relief a key part of the B/S model that may otherwise be somewhat unclear when considered purely theoretically: the base is not only determinative of the superstructure, but the superstructure is, as a consequence, epiphenomenal with no causal power of its own. 

This theory of history naturally lends itself to a certain theory of historical change as proceeding along the pattern of a change in the economic organization of society leading to a change in the political and ideological structure of society. Marx writes in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or–this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms–with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution

In other words, the revolution occurs at the moment the productive forces develop to such an extent that the social relations (i.e., the form of social organization) are no longer sufficient. The superstructural fields, consequently, are epiphenomena of the base and lack a meaningful being of their own. Further, the most extreme reduction of this type allows that all terms, such as revolution, be re-conceptualized in economic terms instead, or explained by reference to qualities of the economic structure. A given individual is a conservative because he owns capital and thus has an economic interest in regressive ideology, a revolutionary is progressive because she is a worker and so has an interest in upending the capitalist system, etc. Alternatively, the popularity (and eventual victory) of socialism and communism is treated as a product of the progressive centralization of capital, the increasing proletarianization of larger and larger swathes of the population, and the advancing immiseration of that working class. In other words, each traditionally political or social thesis is understood to be both capable of being rephrased in economic terms and, additionally, better understood in those economic terms, which are treated as the ‘inner Truth’ or ‘essential Law’ of other parts of society.

B. B/S as Symbolic Generalization

The strong economic determinist conclusion is wrong. It is self-evident that the entire sequence of history cannot be reduced to the changes in productive forces alone. Further, it seems basically unfair: the strong economic determinist thesis is followed basically by no one, and, from a certain light, the history of Marxist thought can be seen as the history of various attempts to rescue this model through re-interpretation of the relation it posits between the base and superstructure as not unidirectional but somehow ‘dialectical’ in nature, ‘reciprocal, ‘two-way,’ etc., basically, holding that the base does not straightforwardly determine the superstructure but that the latter has some degree of autonomy and influences the base as well. (Alternatively, more creative thinkers have instead opted to formally retain the schema, without any of its  negative consequences, by altering the relation of determination in such a fashion as to make it basically meaningless, ’in the final instance.’)

I submit that these attempts at modifying are generally unsatisfactory on two counts: first, any over-extensive modification of the original schema either obliterates whatever is unique or particular to it, making it intellectually superfluous, or is a ‘modification’ in name only. In the first case, it is not a controversial thesis whatsoever to say that economic production is ‘one factor among many,’ that it ‘plays some role,’ or even that it is the primary ‘influence’ on human behavior. It is difficult to imagine anyone disagreeing with these points on principle, even if they might quibble about the specific formulation and, in fact, the ‘primacy’ of economic factors seems to actually be the starting premise for most of bourgeois economics. Karl Marx becomes the ‘father of the sociology department’ and a great ‘inspiration,’ which is good and fine for academics (presumably, we strive for something more). In the second case, modifications that do not go so far as to remove the theory of any significance end up being merely rhetorical at best and sophistry at worst. Either only the most superficial credence is given to the role of non-economic factors—usually compelled by the necessity of at least appearing to others to take issues such as women’s liberation ‘seriously’ or for the purpose of seeming intelligent—and economic determination is always the actual starting-point and ultimate recourse in argumentation, or the ‘dialectic' between the base and the superstructure is a flexible one with its bounds and structure totally determined by whatever is most convenient for winning the argument at hand. When my conclusion demands that the ideological play the dominant role, I begin to preach about the limits of economic determinism and the ‘importance of other factors.’ Where your conclusion demands the ideological play the same role, it quickly becomes clear, at least to me, that this is an intrusion of ‘idealism’ and ‘subjectivism’ into what should be a properly ‘materialist’ debate. What remains consistent throughout all such modifications is that they are basically useless and inconsistent except as tools for the close-minded dogmatist and his metaphysician colleague, who admires the technique of these theoretical gymnastics.

Leaving aside the problem of the superficiality of these modifications to B/S theory, the second count that they must be convicted on, and the more significant one, is that these modifications do not understand that the utility of the B/S model is precisely in its extreme schematism. When given a shovel, the ingenious thinker attempts to add to the tip a pick-axe, a fishing spear, a hoe, a rake, and a hammer and then declares that he has improved the original tool as now it can be used everywhere for every problem. The grave-digger meanwhile picks up his own ‘simple' shovel and sets to digging. This Frankenstein-device is of no use to him. And a Frankenstein-theory is of no use to us, either. The schematic character of the B/S model is what both limits it and provides its actual power: without needing to be accurate, it becomes a tool that allows any practitioner to, in the face of any event, have at his disposal a model that he can utilize to structure the novel characteristics before him. He does not need to reduce the particular characteristics of each event in the way that the B/S model demands. However, given a particular model of reduction, of the relationship between determining factors and secondary, derivative factors, he is capable of structuring the terms of the event in a way that effectively allows for practical intervention.

In other words, the role of the B/S model is what prior was examined as one of Kuhn’s “symbolic generalizations.” As a symbolic generalization, the function of the B/S model is to define the terms and approaches of Marxist theory. It is a precondition of practice in relation to an event more than it is an inductively formulated result of empirical investigation (i.e., it is not the result of an application of theory to an event, but is itself the theory applied to an event). It is possible to schematically analogize in a highly abstract way the development of historical materialism in Kuhn’s terms for the sake of emphasizing the analogy before continuing: 

1. The young, pre-mature Marx possesses his starting worldview or ‘paradigm,’ the Young Hegelianism in vogue during his time in university. He is attached to the theory of the other contemporary radical left-Hegelians such as Bruno Bauer, criticizes the repressive German state, the alienating ‘illusions’ of religion, etc., and is chiefly interested in politics and philosophy from a radical-democratic perspective.

2. The pre-mature Marx faces an anomaly: the failure for his contemporaries to win democracy in Germany while, at the same time, German politics was in crisis. While Marx’s previous Young Hegelian comrades try to adjust and maneuver in the new environment, it is Marx who attempts to develop a new mode of thinking, which will later become historical materialism. In his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx describes the period as follows:

   a. Although I studied jurisprudence, I pursued it as a subject subordinated to philosophy and history. In the year 1842-43, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests. The deliberations of the Rhenish Landtag on forest thefts and the division of landed property; the official polemic started by Herr von Schaper, then Oberprasident of the Rhine Province, against the Rheinische Zeitung about the condition of the Moselle peasantry, and finally the debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first instance to turn my attention to economic questions. On the other hand, at that time when good intentions “to push forward” often took the place of factual knowledge, an echo of French socialism and communism, slightly tinged by philosophy, was noticeable in the Rheinische Zeitung. I objected to this dilettantism, but at the same time frankly admitted in a controversy with the Allgemeine Augsburger Zeitung that my previous studies did not allow me to express any opinion on the content of the French theories. When the publishers of the Rheinische Zeitung conceived the illusion that by a more compliant policy on the part of the paper it might be possible to secure the abrogation of the death sentence passed upon it, I eagerly grasped the opportunity to withdraw from the public stage to my study.

3. The intense theoretical study Marx engages in following his disillusionment with Young Hegelianism results in The German Ideology, his and Engels’ first proper setting-out of their views (and a pre-formation of a full worldview) as a response to the anomaly. Here, an anomaly is clearly insufficient to transform into a crisis and a new worldview without additional theoretical work. Without the articulation of a new worldview of historical materialism, his previous comrades were unable to take a forward step and move past their old conceptions. Engels describes the importance of The German Ideology:

   a. the two of us in Brussels in the year 1845 set about: “to work out in common the opposition of our view”—the materialist conception of history which was elaborated mainly by Marx—to the ideological view of German philosophy, in fact, to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience. The resolve was carried out in the form of a criticism of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript, two large octavo volumes, had long reached its place of publication in Westphalia when we received the news that altered circumstances did not allow of its being printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose—self-clarification! (Ludwig Feuerbach)

4. In The German Ideology we find a number of key illustrative formulations of Marxism. We have the notorious division of history into stages of modes of production, the statement on Marx’s human and practical “premises,” emphasizing economic reproduction, his rejection of philosophy as a means for human liberation, etc. But as yet these are rather scattered, mostly polemical in style, and not presented logically. 

5. It is only ten years later that Marx properly articulates his new way of thinking in explicit terms and in public discourse in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In it, his most enduring summation of historical materialism is presented as the “general conclusion” resulting from his work that “became the guiding principle of my studies.” It is at this point that one might say his pre-formative labor finally bore fruit in a worldview capable of actually structuring practice with its own terms, method, and way of looking at things. This general worldview is summed up famously as follows: 

   a. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

6. For Kuhn, a paradigm acts as the basis for further study and articulation of theory. In relation to this initial thesis and the materialist worldview more generally, the rest of Marx’s work can be understood as the continued articulation, refining, and development of this initial worldview.

It is without question that this short sequence papers over extremely complex historical events and shifts. But, it does provide us with a visual model of what so far has been presented only in abstract-logical form. It helps us conceptualize how the B/S model and the theory of historical materialism, more generally, was not the product of disinterested observation but internal to Marx’s subjective relationship and attempts to understand, explain, and intervene in contemporary events. 

In other words, this short schema provides us with a picture of the B/S model as a starting point for practice (both intellectual and political) rather than a final description of objective reality. The ‘tools’ of Young Hegelianism had failed him and, so, he was driven to produce new, better ones. 

C. The Utility of the B/S Model as a Symbolic Generalization, Examples

In short, the B/S model, as a summation of historical materialism, functions for Marx as a starting point for analysis and understanding of the various events he encounters, rather than as a description of objective reality. Rather than a statement, it is an ideal model to incorporate and organize data. 

To substantiate this claim, it will be valuable to turn to Marx’s own works. It is a truism among Marxologists that, when Marx turns his attention away from abstract theory and towards the concrete, he seems to immediately dispose of the economistic aspects of the theory of historical materialism. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte III and Marx’s political writings more generally, along with Capital, Marx examines events (e.g. of the rise of Louis Bonaparte III and the structure of capitalist political economy, respectively) without recourse to reduction to productive forces in the simplistic way that characterizes the B/S model. 

From this, it is easy to dismiss the B/S model completely. Taking Marx’s own word that it does, however, reflect his actual views, it is possible to see how the B/S model is still understood sheerly as a model. Treating it as analogous to the symbolic generalizations earlier described, it might be posited that each analysis Marx applies to a particular event is understood not merely on its own terms or without method but by the construction of complex models (or “sketches” and “schemas”) structurally homologous to the initial, simplified one, in much the same way that f = ma was seen to, in the study of free fall, transform into mg = m(d^2s/dt^2) and, in the study of pendulums, transform into mg sin[symbol] = -ml(d^2[symbol]/dt^2). In the case of The Eighteenth Brumaire, for example, the concept of “base” is expanded to include the whole sum of class political action and not merely reproductive economic practice or productive forces proper.

Looking at The Eighteenth Brumaire, it is possible to construct an image of how this process might actually function:

The defeat of the June insurgents […] had revealed that here “bourgeois republic” signifies the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes. It had proved that in countries with an old civilization, with a developed formation of classes, with modern conditions of production, and with an intellectual consciousness in which all traditional ideas have been dissolved by the work of centuries, the republic signifies in general only the political form of revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of life […]
During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had “saved” society from “the enemies of society.” They had given out the watchwords of the old society, “property, family, religion, order,” to their army as passwords and had proclaimed to the counterrevolutionary crusaders: “In this sign thou shalt conquer!”

The procedure begins with an attempt to fully assimilate the event to the model. Political forms belonging to the superstructure (the “bourgeois republic”) are dissolved fully into class relations (the republic “signifies the unlimited despotism of one class”). This is exactly the conclusion one would reach from strict application of the B/S model. However, the event, as earlier noted, is always in tension with the model, and the result is that what has been achieved by this assimilation is a total annihilation of the specificity of the event. If Marx seeks to actually understand the coup, in other words, he must—and he does—make recourse to the presence of a number of factors incompatible with the B/S model that are nevertheless objective and determining. These include, for example, “the tradition of all dead generations,” the positions and relationships between the various political parties, the inner “character” and “pretensions” of the government, and the criticism of it (i.e., ideology sensu stricto), so on and so forth.

This tension between the model (as representative of a worldview) and the event necessarily pushes the theorist into a creative position. This is the moment of revolutionary theoretical practice, as contrasted to academic or moribund theory. It is extremely easy to close one’s eyes and mechanically reduce in the face of multifarious circumstances X to always Y, to ‘paint landscapes with gray.’ It is significantly more difficult to take a radical position in relation to every novel event and to take that position precisely without canceling the event’s novelty. The event cannot be assimilated to the model, and so the theorist must construct a new, specific model, using the prior one as inspiration (but not as a rule-set), capable of classifying and comprehending the event. 

D. Conclusion

This work has applied Kuhn's insights on scientific revolutions and exemplars, showing how Marxism itself can be understood not as a fixed, dogmatic system but as an open, evolving practice of revolutionary thought. This anti-systematic quality of Marxism underscores its capacity to engage creatively with historical and material conditions, continually revising its theoretical tools to address new realities. Meanwhile, the base/superstructure model, while often criticized for its reductionism, functions effectively as a symbolic generalization—a heuristic device that guides analysis and practice. However, true revolutionary practice lies in transcending the limitations of this model, fashioning new conceptual frameworks that arise from the tension between theoretical structures and the novelty of concrete events.
Ultimately, this analysis reaffirms that Marxist theory is not a passive reflection of objective reality but an active, dialectical engagement with it.
As both Kuhn and Marx reveal, knowledge and practice are inherently dynamic, driven by contradictions and the relentless pursuit of understanding. This openness to change, grounded in a commitment to human emancipation, is what ensures the continued relevance and vitality of Marxist thought in confronting the challenges of the present and the future.

Postscript: Marx’s Method in the 18th Brumaire

In the text, this happens almost immediately: the initial reduction of political form to purely class relations is itself dissolved in the sentence that follows it where, rather than reducing politics to economic class, Marx introduces several additional factors, each considered distinct and possessing a power of determination. They include the quality of France as an “old civilization,” indicating the role of tradition qua tradition; the “developed formation of classes,” implying the importance of the historic-social development of a consolidated group; the “modern conditions of production,” emphasizing the social consequences of the contemporary technology of economic production and, further, situating it within the political-economic concept of uneven development on an international scale; and, finally, the “intellectual consciousness” of France in its particular relation to the contemporary trend of ideological critique. None of these factors are reduced to the economic structure but are treated as themselves playing an unqualified role in the ultimate determination of the particular concrete event under analysis.

At the same time, Marx deftly restructures what had first occupied the secondary role (superstructure, the “bourgeois republic” as form) in a way that limits its scope. Occupying this position instead are the formal slogans the various political actors use to justify their actions, such as describing themselves as the “party of Order” or using the “watchwords” of “property, family, religion, order.” While “order” is the banner under which the anti-proletarian party organizes its resistance, it is actually, again, tradition, intellectual consciousness, historical class-formation, etc., that determine the actual dynamics of the event and the victory of the “party of Order” rather than these slogans.

This description presents the process somewhat as an ‘altering’ of the B/S model (in this case, to include within the base political practice and to delimit the superstructure to formal political slogans). But even if this was necessary for the sake of presentation, it should be rejected. Marx is not ‘expanding’ the concept of the base, but rather fashioning a new model wherein political action occupies a determinative role and which is ultimately the product of contact between the initial model (B/S) and the novel event (Napoleon III’s coup) within the medium of practice. Using the model as a symbolic generalization, Marx is organizing and classifying the data while developing a conceptual scheme with which to understand it. This is not just wordplay but has important practical consequences. It shows how Marx’s theory cannot be understood as an academic or contemplative exercise but, even when purely textual, is itself (one type of) revolutionary practice.

The 18th Brumaire is a popular text for theorists who want to understand Marx’s specific views on the State. An attempt to develop a Marxist theory of the State using it as a basis could be (and has been) the subject of book-length investigations. Leaving aside this aspect of the question,  then, the presence of this angle in The 18th Brumaire provides a clear point of departure between it and works such as The German Ideology, and a justification for the process so far described as similar to that described in the field of science by Kuhn. Take the conclusion developed by Marx in the final section of The 18th Brumaire:

Finally the parliamentary republic, in its struggle against the revolution, found itself compelled to strengthen the means and the centralization of governmental power with repressive measures. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it. The parties, which alternately contended for domination, regarded the possession of this huge state structure as the chief spoils of the victor.
But under the absolute monarchy, during the first Revolution, and under Napoleon the bureaucracy was only the means of preparing the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Under the Restoration, under Louis Philippe, under the parliamentary republic, it was the instrument of the ruling class, however much it strove for power of its own.

These conclusions are only comprehensible through the terms of political class struggle and the (structure of the) class State. The B/S model, however, takes as its determinative term the economic structure, and theses such as the “perfect[ing]” versus the “breaking” of the State, or the function of either “centralization” or “repressi[on],” cannot with it be reconciled. The B/S model considers the State purely as superstructure (or, limitedly, in its economic role), and can comprehend political theses as being attributable only to changes in the economic base, rather than as being determined by political struggle in its own right. The State cannot find itself “compelled” to do anything, let alone political activity, because that would mean that political factors are able to determine outside of changes in the economic structure. Further, if one strictly sticks to the B/S model and does not attempt to compromise it through analysis of political events, it is difficult to see why one should focus on the State (or political struggle) at all, except perhaps at the specific moment of revolution, insofar as all ‘real change’ occurs outside of it. In fact, this is exactly the sentiment shared by many radical non-Marxist or post-Marxist formations who, rather than engage in political struggle, attempt either to organize the working class ‘directly’ or eschew such categories altogether.

However, the foregoing objection seems to rest on agreeing with the earlier claim that the B/S model should be understood as strictly schematic. This is, obviously, not how many who currently utilize the model prefer to understand it. They do not see anything wrong with flexible expansion or contraction of the terms of the B/S model, and adopt theories such as the ‘autonomy of the superstructure,’ which also provides somewhat of a methodology for this line of thinking. It might be presented as follows: in ‘normal’ periods, the economic is the dominant factor. But in exceptional circumstances, a certain superstructural factor may ‘take precedence’ and operate as the dominant factor in lieu of the economic, which nevertheless is still determinative ‘in the last instance,’ or which determines the timing and structure of the state of exception.

As aforementioned, such an approach cripples the value of the B/S model rather than strengthens it. This flexibility transforms effective practice into a jelly that can be distorted to fit into any argument at any point, without tension. Whereas with the division of Marx’s political analysis from his philosophical approach, Marxism possessed two tools that could be utilized in the practice of two distinct fields, now, we are given one tool that has utility in no field. Marxist dialectics—a dialectics of the concrete and particular—is exchanged for the “system-building” of figures like Dühring, where, because the theory can mean anything, and apply to everything, without reflexive modification by events, it means nothing. And so we observe that even—rather, especially—the most insignificant communist theorist and activist “will not go in for anything less than a complete “system.”’

The first objection to the expansion of the B/S model is that such a modification undermines the model’s specific and positive practical consequences in the sphere of political action itself. The B/S model is not merely a theory for analysis but also an ideological object with its own influence and relationship to political practice. In this capacity, it can be conceived as a bundle of ‘senses’ or connotations that highlight Marx’s materialist commitments better than a formal philosophical treatise would be able to, and with significantly more emotional valence. As pointed out earlier, a theory of the importance of the economic factor alone is insufficient to move beyond idealism, let alone banal liberal political science, unless conceived as structurally limiting. The ideal is refused possession of its own sphere; instead, it is always irradiated by the presence of a ‘gap’ (illustrated here as the economic factor) that functions as genuinely ‘outside’ the ideal by manifesting as a pure domination or ‘overriding’ of the latter. Bourgeois ideology prefers to imagine that the state of affairs currently in power is permanent and immovable. In response to that, the radical reduction of the B/S model is able to reply that it not only will change, but it must change, and that this is the case even if the immediate order appears—or even is, at the current moment—stable and finished. The presence of this rupture in the framework of accepted reality always turns our eyes to the possibility of revolutionary change: even if the prospects seem poor from a rational perspective, reason, thankfully, is only the subordinate of other, greater powers. Contained in the formulation is a re-directing of energy away from contemplation or whole-hearted investment in existing social structures and ideologies in favor of the economic as a category that is supposed to stand as proof of their contingency.

Further, the B/S model invokes certain moralistic and cultural mores that play a role in developing the conditions necessary for the objective of proletarian revolution. By drawing a fundamental contrast between the provinces culturally identified with (especially at the time) the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, such as politics, intellectual practices, idyllic contemplation, etc., and those traditionally associated in history with the laboring classes, such as the ‘physical,’ the ‘productive,’ the ‘material,’ etc.—and, importantly, by making the former subordinate to the latter—Marx contributes to the articulation of a distinct and proud independent working-class identity. While the set of values ‘belonging’ to labor were historically seen as negative, the B/S model, in the field of philosophy, effectively reverses that. Conformism to elite culture is rejected as a virtue, and that culture is in fact given the connotation of ‘sin,’ in the sense of being superfluous. Aside from that, the emphasis on the economic itself functions, by treating the economic as central, to promote the organization of political struggle along class lines. In a period where huge sums of laborers freshly dispossessed of their peasant status were flooding into cities to engage in industrial labor, this aspect of the theory, in particular, proves to be especially resonating even if, strictly speaking, Marx’s discussion of labor is not limited to the industrial labor that characterized production at the time. This point also presents in another light the indirect relationship between symbolic generalization and practice: in each case, each particular thesis proves itself to be more than descriptive,  i.e., it does not only describe a reality, but also normative, i.e., it plays a role in shaping what that reality is. 

The second, and in my view more important, objection to the expansion of the B/S model is that to do so obscures the particular dynamic and laws of the field that a given model is applied to. The ‘character’ of reduction in the B/S model is of a certain specific quality, as is the relationship between the determinant and determined factors. Implicit within any model, including the one under consideration, is not merely the relationship between the factors but the particular quality of that relationship that is itself not immediately derivable from the formal terms of the model but is as necessary to it as any other aspect. This particular quality has, however, immense significance in the way a model is understood and related to in practice.

To see how this is the case, we can turn to the two models already elaborated. The B/S model is characterized by the relationship between the “development” of the “productive forces” leading to a conflict between those forces and the “existing relations of production.” The model of political analysis that we drew in broad strokes from The 18th Brumaire, on the other hand, is characterized by the relationship between political action (along with other factors) and the actual and formal representations that result from that political conflict. We might provisionally describe the principle of the former as growth (of the productive forces) and the latter as, for lack of a better word, shifts in the political balance of forces. It is clear that these principles are qualitatively different and lead to different practical approaches. The development of productive forces, for example, cannot be understood through political dynamics but is straightforwardly accumulative and technical. Neither did political action during the period described by The 18th Brumaire simply ‘accumulate’ to result in the coup of Napoleon III; rather, it was the conflicts between classes, and the consequences of those conflicts, that altogether resulted in a situation that could not be expressed in quantitative terms and which in lieu of technical and scientific logic relies rather on ideology, culture, and, subjective ‘talents’ in France.