- John Milton Bunch
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Flowers for Science and Marxism
John Milton Bunch
30 September 2025
Special thanks to John M. (Jack) Bunch for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
I’m going to repurpose the floral metaphor here and use it to discuss two related, but distinct, topics related to Marx and science as discussed by Burgis, Hamilton and McManus in Flowers for Marx. In what might be for some readers the more maudlin sense, I’ll address the question of “Can Marxism be a science,” and conclude that no, it cannot, unless we reject the definition of science that scientists themselves use.
And in the more hopeful, spring-is-in-the-air sense, I’ll address the deeply intertwined questions of “Can Marxism be studied scientifically,” and “Can science itself be used to further Marxist goals.” The answer to both of those questions is yes. Yes with caveats, of course, because to approach a question with science means being willing to give up or modify existing systems of belief, and a good bit of this essay is devoted to exploring this particular aspect of the relationship between Marxism and science.
I want to add to the hopeful sense by saying that as an intellectual product generated by social media discourse, Flowers for Marx is about as good as it gets and I congratulate and thank the authors for what they’ve done. I have some experience attempting to promote productive leftist discourse in the very same contemporary urine swamp, and found it more often than not a place where real thinking and learning go to die, or worse, be resurrected as profilicity-driven schizophasia. Flowers for Marx is something wholly different.
Also, this essay is not intended to be polemical. I’ve got no political project to sell anyone. For my part in general, and with regard to this essay in particular, I’m not claiming to be a socialist or a Marxist, nor am I claiming to be opposed to or outside of either. Instead, I’m trying to read Flowers for Marx through the lens of someone who seems to share similar normative beliefs to the authors about how the world should be, but is utterly ambivalent, and not just a little flummoxed, with regard to a theory of how it gets there.
Defining Marxism and Socialism
Before we get into a discussion about science and Flowers for Marx, I’ll first attempt to define exactly what we mean by both Marxism and socialism, then discuss the definition of science. I’m going to define Marxism as a worldview, or a model of the world, inspired by the writings of Karl Marx and/or something in the apparent canon of Marx-influenced writing of the intervening century and a half. There are many variations of a worldview put forth in this literature, but to tie this discussion to the ground I’ll use what I can identify as perhaps critical shared elements of each of the unique Marxisms espoused by Burgis, Hamilton and McManus.
First and foremost, in Marxism there is a shared belief that mode of production, a phenomenon characterized by a specific socio-economic relationship between human beings under capitalism, is itself exploitative, in that it extracts an inordinate quantity of resources from one person (a wage laborer) for the benefit of another. Most people in a capitalist society are dependent upon wage labor to sustain themselves and are thus part of a specific economic class of exploited workers. Further, this capitalist mode of production has a tremendous influence on how members of society think and act.
Socialism is a socio-economic system distinct from capitalism in which those otherwise dependent on wage labor under capitalism are no longer subject to this exploitation. To clarify, I’ll simply adopt Ben Burgis’ statement from an earlier article6:
Socialists want to replace the current system of private ownership of the means of production with a new system based on collective ownership and economic democracy.
Beyond this, the intellectual edifice and goals of each unique Marxism and/or socialism begin to differ, and often substantially so.
To summarize, in the simplest possible terms, socialism is a desired form of social and economic organization to replace capitalism. Marxism is the acceptance of a theory of the world of humans that, among other things, provides an explanatory model of the operations of capitalism.
Science and Explanatory Model-Building
The perspectives on and implicit definitions of science appear to vary a bit in Flowers for Marx but are generally discussed or explicated in relation to Althusser. My intention here is not to critique Althusser1 nor any particular philosophy of science, but rather to consider Marx in the manner of a contemporary scientist studying the phenomena with which Marx was concerned. Also, my attempt here Is not to criticize any of the definitions of science used by McManus, Burgis or Hamilton, but to simply ensure I’ve provided a clear definition of it for use in this discussion.
Mention is made in Flowers for Marx of Popper, and to a lesser extent Quine, and I don’t find the claims made or the discussions themselves to be off-base, so much as simply a bit anemic. For example, yes, science progresses through falsification. This is because falsification is a powerful method of testing the predictability of a theory. Falsification is not the only element of scientific model-building, and the theory becomes neither scientific nor true simply because it hasn’t been falsified (just to clarify, I’m using the terms model and theoryinterchangeably).
That’s an important point to remember – science isn’t about proving theories to be true. It’s about creating explanatory models that best explain what we see, and that’s as close as we’re going to get to proof or Truth. Again, science is after the most likely explanation for the things we observe, not definitive proof that a particular phenomenon is caused by a specific mechanism.
Also, it’s worth noting that the phenomena with which Marx was concerned, and to which science would ostensibly interface, were not the motions of stars and planets. Marx was concerned with human behavior. In the contemporary practice of science, Marx’ work would fall across many fields within this general category in which a scientific methodology might be applied, including but not limited to economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history.
Different authors, such as Herbert A. Simon4, have discussed and characterized the nature of the application of science to human vs. non-human categories of phenomena, attempting to identify the specific epistemological challenges faced in each case. While the specifics of this are up for grabs, few would argue that a scientific methodology is different between these categories, but nonetheless possible.
The approach to science I’ve described is often called post-positivism and is the contemporary scientific approach through which any discussion of Marx and science must be considered. This is the way science is generally practiced today in the fields across which Marx’ work falls and was described by Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions7. It’s science as used and understood across the disciplines within which the subject matter of Marx would be found, including economics, psychology, political science, information systems, etc.
It makes a couple of primary assumptions about the world – first, that the universe follows natural laws (which simply means that nature is not capricious). Second, that people can gain at least enough purchase on these natural laws that explanatory models capable of accurate prediction can be assembled. Also, importantly, it values parsimony in its explanations as a way to reduce error.
To reemphasize this, because it’s central to understanding, theory is never proven.
Explanations are ultimately probabilistic, with the goal to produce the most likely explanation possible for an observed phenomenon. Theory is always subject to modification and never passes into the realm of Truth, and this uncertainty is baked into its method. Again, the critical test is a model’s ability to predict, and whether a given model predicts things about the phenomenon under study more accurately than other models.
In practice this means that a scientist may spend a career building a theory, only to abandon it as new evidence comes to light. For an example of how this plays out among real scientists, I’m going to refer to a paper by James J. Jenkins5, an experimental psychologist and professor of mine who described in detail his own experience with this process. Jenkins was trained as a behaviorist, meaning he had adopted a specific paradigm (in Kuhnian terms), or intellectual structure within which explanatory models are built, and within which to consider human behavioral phenomena such as language and memory. This includes assumptions about things like what constitutes valid information about the phenomena under study, and assumptions about the scope and form of causal mechanisms.
In the above paper, Jenkins refers to his previous behaviorist perspective on memory and language as associationism, which held that the results of memory experiments and other psychological events could be explained via a basic, finite set of units and the relations between them. Many experiments were conducted and papers written and published under this assumption, and associationism seemed to offer the correct (what Jekins called) meta-theoretical framework for the results he was finding. At the time, it was the dominant experimental approach to the study of such phenomena across all of experimental psychology, and Jenkins had made a name for himself in the field through this work.
But then he and his colleagues discovered that differences in the performance of subjects for things such as differences in instruction given to experimental subjects in recall tasks could not adequately be explained via the association of finite sets of units (for example, lists of words) alone. While many researchers facing such problems attempted to shoe-horn their findings into the associationist framework, Jenkins adopted a different perspective, contextualism. When he did this, his explanatory theory improved greatly, and he was able to predict experimental results with more precision. This broke the rules, so to speak, of the associationist framework, as the contextualist perspective posited active processes at work in memory far beyond what that associationist framework would allow.
The findings of Jenkins and other researchers of that era produced, for example, models of language that answer many more questions than the (for example) behaviorist models they replaced. Chomsky’s universal grammar8, for example, is one of these, and while it’s been challenged and modified over the years, along with the idea that a UG itself is even possible, few challenge its basic insight that some sort of active mechanism or collection of mechanisms in the human mental apparatus, whether they operate on a universal grammar or not, are at work in language acquisition and production and must be understood in order to understand the phenomenon of human language.
In Jenkins case, and in Chomsky’s, behaviorist models were failing to produce predictive analysis of experimental results, so models were radically changed. These are both examples of the paradigm shift in experimental psychology from behaviorism to cognitivism that occurred in the 1960’s, and of, in Jenkins own words, why you have to be willing to recognize and admit that a model isn’t working, and change it in the face of new evidence. Even when it hurts.
It should be noted that neither the associationist explanations of Jenkins for the results of his memory experiments, nor Chomsky’s model of UG, remain unchallenged over time, and both have always been subject to falsification and revision. Each, in its time, attempted to offer the best explanation of a particular aspect of human psychological functioning, and to the extent that each failed to adequately predict or explain data, helped produce better models.
In the case of the results of human memory experiments, such as those of Jenkins and colleagues, it’s easy to see how a scientist could take a somewhat detached position, and radically modify existing models, even if substantial career currency has been invested in them. But when those models deal with something less technical, such as why history and society play out as they do, and one’s own role within that, the ability to change one’s accepted model becomes much, much more challenging.
The upshot is that scientific explanations always have an element of uncertainty. You must be willing to change your explanatory models when the evidence no longer supports them or better supports an alternative explanation.
Interestingly, as Ben Burgis notes in Flowers for Marx:
…Marx himself frequently revised his views in light of new considerations or new evidence and spent an awful lot of time wearing down his seat at the reading room of the British museum precisely because he felt the need to keep track of the most current social-scientific research and incorporate it into his understanding of how capitalism worked and how it might be overcome.
Sounds like Marx and Jenkins weren’t too far apart in their model-building methodology.
The Interaction of Scientific Methodology and Different Marxist Frameworks
For individual, psychological reasons the uncertainty of scientific explanations and the need for model revision often make a scientific approach difficult to fully realize, even when the phenomenon under question is relatively abstract and technical, like human memory. When the phenomenon under study is more deeply personal and involves beliefs concerning how the social world works and one’s place in it, the uncertainty of science can become a significant emotional challenge to its implementation.
It’s here we often begin to see a split among Marxists (in general, not necessarily among McManus, Burgis and Hamilton) regarding the issue of socialism and science. Some people are drawn to socialism for moral or ethical reasons and drawn to Marxism for its utility in offering insight into the current state of capitalism and how movement toward a more egalitarian socio-economic system after capitalism might proceed. For this group, Marxism can be considered an explanatory framework for the social world, not unlike Jenkins originally found associationism to be an explanatory framework for human memory.
Science has a great deal to offer here, as predictive models of human behavior, society and social interaction increase the chance of success in moving toward a more socialist future. As this group tends to be focused on socialism as a goal and is willing to change existing models of the world in the effort to reach that goal, science provides a powerful tool.
Others, however, have a commitment to Marxism first and foremost, and see socialism as something wholly dependent upon Marxism. For this group, science often seems to appear as Satan from the Book of Job - a constant adversary and inquisitor attempting to derail the True Marxist from the path of God. As Jenkins said, to do science you must be willing to recognize when your model isn’t working and change it. If you aren’t willing to do this, you can’t use science.
McManus in particular seems to have an awareness of the above and lets it come to bear on his discussion. In regard to Althusser’s discussion of Marx and science, McManus accurately states “But from a purely scientific standpoint… why should the existence of class power be taken as oppressive, and not simply a social fact about which the true scientist has no opinion aside from analysis?” This is an important point, as it clearly establishes the scientific goal of understanding a specific phenomenon (what we observe to be “class power”) from our own moral or ethical feelings about it. If we can do this, and build or modify our models with new information, science becomes possible.
McManus also provides a useful anecdote here from philosopher Derek Parfit, in which an economist presents a formula he describes as free of bias. Parfit intervenes, and notes that the economist has predicated his entire presentation on the assumption that it was better for people to be well off and happy than not. The writings of Marx are filled with seemingly similar assertions – such as the assertion that wage labor has specific, deleterious effects on workers. Are you willing to question that? If not, science can’t help you.
The Incrementalist Approach of McManus and Burgis and Really Existing Data
McManus and Burgis represent incremental approaches to socialism, in which incremental political change moves society from its current form to some form of socialism. Personally, I’d like to believe such a program would work, as it seems reasonable and democratic – socialist policies are gradually implemented via the voting booth, with voter appraisal and positive approval of each successive policy change.
McManus and Burgis do not seem opposed to, or at least their discussion does not seem inconsistent with, the application of science to the furtherance of their project of incremental progress toward a socialist future. In other words, if the data indicates that some part of their model is weak, they seem willing to make adjustments.
Which brings us to the million-dollar question – what does science say about the feasibility of their program and its chances of success? The cold hard answer is this – I don’t think it looks promising. In future essays I hope to explore in detail some of the specific findings in the biological and behavioral sciences that I think come to bear on and support this conclusion, but I’ll give a couple of examples now I think need to be addressed.
To be clear, I am not making the inane claim that “science says socialism is impossible” or “science says capitalism is natural” or any such thing as that. But I do think the scientific data highlight some serious challenges that have not been addressed.
One area in particular that seems to offer a challenge to the incrementalist view is the data on individual differences in political affinity and orientation, across multiple disciplines. Findings in this area seriously challenge the idea that a majority of the public will align itself with a socialist position as currently constituted. Which is to say, I’m not sure the incrementalist approach has the tools it needs to capture and sustain the percentage of the public necessary for the full course of sustained change.
As an example, consider the findings of political and biological scientist Pete Hatemi17 and colleagues, in a recent showdown over the Moral Foundations Theory of social psychologist Jonathon Haidt18. In a 2017 paper Hatemi and colleagues addressed Haidt’s “moral foundations theory.” Briefly, Haidt presented results which found a biological predisposition for political affinity, which Haidt and colleagues explained as a process mediated by morality. In other words, Haidt collected data which he interpreted as suggesting that people tend to have a biological predisposition for certain moral orientations, and these moral orientations, or foundations, translate into political affinities.
Hatemi and colleagues challenged this, and in an analysis of monozygotic twins raised together and apart discovered that, essentially, there was no need to include “moral foundations” in the explanatory model. The takeaway here for our purposes is that separate lines of research, from different fields (social psychology in the case of Haidt and political science/biology in the case of Hatemi) both found biologically-based differences in political orientation. Also, to be very clear, this is not an argument for the culturally-dreaded-in-Marxist-circles concept of “biological determinism.” It is simple evidence that, included in the myriad of social and other external forces that shape a person’s values and ideas related to the political affinity they ultimately express, there are biological drivers that must be accounted for.
The “frames” and conceptual metaphors theory of cognitive linguist George Lakoff9 is also salient here. Lakoff has found evidence that voting decisions, voter understanding and preference is driven by conceptual metaphors that exist deep within the cognitive framework to provide meaning and interpretability to whatever election-relevant information voters process. He finds, for example, that conservative voters tend to operate from a “strict-father” metaphor, in which one’s experience in the world, and how the world should be, is contingent upon placating a powerful master.
Liberal (in the American, generally partisan political sense) voters operate from within a nurturing parent metaphor, in which caring for and being cared for by others provides the framework for understanding the world and making voting choices. These conceptual metaphors are deeply baked-in to the human information processing system, are very resistant to change, and guide how we experience and locate ourselves within the social and political space.
Another finding of Lakoff that seems particular relevant here are the individual differences in information processing ability between causative models requiring systemic vs direct causation. When considering cause and effect mechanisms, sometimes causation can be described as direct. For example, punching someone in the nose causes a nosebleed. Other times, causation can be described as systemic, as in the interaction of various anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic drivers of atmospheric buildup of CO2, changes in average global temperature over time, and sea level rise.
What Lakoff finds is that some people struggle greatly with understanding explanations for things involving systemic causation and will reject such explanations in favor of simpler ones because of it. This is especially salient here, as there is a certain amount of systemic causation baked into most leftist theory, or at least discussion, and this will lead to many voters choosing other alternatives they can more easily understand.
Also, let’s consider the above findings within the context of the past 100 years of electronic media. In the days of radio and newspapers, Walter Lippmann11 argued that an informed public did not, and could not, exist, and that better education and more democracy would not overcome the problem of Aristotle’s non-omniscient citizen. Lippmann proposed that voters make choices based on stereotypes and could not do the work necessary to adequately make informed voting decisions.
His solution was epistocracy, which Noam Chomsky bookended at the end of the century with his claim that a manipulated, centralized media environment was the reason that the public votes against its own best interest10. As I write this, well into the era of the Internet with the entire corpus of recorded human knowledge at everyone’s fingertips, the data indicate that people do not understand the issues upon which they cast their votes any more significantly than they did in Lippmann’s day3. In fact, Lippmann’s observations of the behavior of the newspaper reader in 1925 apply without modification to the media consumer of today.
The small scattering of scientific findings I’ve related above (there are many others) over the past several decades appear to support Lippmann’s contention that people do in fact rely on some form of stereotypes, or naïve cognitive/emotional models, to align themselves with one political project over another. Given even these few examples, I’m not sure how a voter-dependent program of political change is to work when it’s dependent upon voters who don’t understand issues, have political leanings influenced by their own unique physiology, struggle with the systemic causations demands of leftist discourse, are highly resistant to change, and do not take advantage of the resources available to educate themselves.
I don’t know that these issues are insurmountable for McManus and Burgis, but certainly they require attention, and I haven’t seen any proposed incrementalist program that adequately addresses them. Bhaskar Sunkara’s The Socialist Manifesto, for example, a popular and recent treatise on an incremental socialist program, certainly does not.
It’s reminiscent of the famed quote by Adlai Stevenson. A supporter exclaimed "Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!" Stevenson answered, "That's not enough. I need a majority."
None of this points to impossibility, and both McManus and Burgis may very well be able to overcome my concerns, and I very much hope that they can. But they’ve got a lot of challenges ahead of them, and it certainly gives rise to skepticism.
The Perilous Path of Marxist Fundamentalism in Social Media Discourse
This brings us to Conrad Bongard Hamilton and his Freudo-Marxist politics of rupture. There is no science here. Not even an attempt, and it isn’t clear to me why Hamilton seems insistent on qualifying Marxism as a science. He’s already got a methodology for building knowledge, and it isn’t clear that science is what he’s looking for, or how it would help.
Hamilton, like his Freudo-Marxist colleagues, has a model of the individual provided by Lacan, located within a model of the social world provided by Marx. As someone trained in cognitive science, the Freudo-Marxist approach seemed ludicrous when I first encountered it.
However, years later and after a good bit of study and interactions with people operating within this framework, I’m of the opinion that this approach can indeed be a very slippery slope, and lead to some extremely unhelpful and downright absurd outcomes, especially when profilicity is operating as the drunk driver.
As the incrementalist approach is dependent upon voters coming to an intellectual understanding of at least a few important Marxist ideas and deciding that these ideas apply to them in specific and profound ways, it’s easy to see how a tension could develop between McManus and Burgis on the one side and Hamilton on the other, as the incrementalist is utterly dependent on the rational, logical voter.
When incrementalists attempt to ply their craft of voter education in the contemporary space of public discourse, primarily social media, they face a very formidable foe: prolificity. A term coined by media philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller and colleague P. J. Ambrosio12 to refer to the central driver of engagement and interaction in the contemporary space of social media. Our identity in the world today is one created via our online profile/s, which we manage and curate through the process of acting while being seen acting by others.
Specifically, this presents challenges for the incrementalists because it works against the incrementalists need for individuals to come to rational conclusions of the sort “yes, I understand what’s meant by wage labor, and yes, I see how it negatively impacts me.” Instead, such an assessment can only be made relative to how others will see one make the assessment and come to that understanding. What’s important is the extent to which such as assessment comports with the social semantics to which one values and to which one appeals, and the various stereotypes that might be in play.
In practice, this means that rather than providing an environment for learning, contemporary public discourse is one of profile-building. Because of this, Freudo-Marxism is particularly vulnerable to distortion in public discourse and its not difficult to see how it could be experienced as an albatross around the neck of instrumentalists, as Freudo-Marxism can provide a very slippery slope for a social media consumer to tread, especially regarding learning about Marx.
I’ve watched this play out in my own experience attempting to promote leftist discourse in the Youtube/podcast space. Specifically, for example, I’ve seen how a fundamentalist Marxism (with or without the psychoanalysis) can function as something akin to religion, with not only science viewed as a foreign threat, but learning new things that contradict the stereotype considered to be anathema to the discourse. In social media the action happens in the space between personal and group identity, and a critical part of this is the definition and marking of shared worldviews. Intellectual inquiry itself always takes a back seat to this process. The social media user is specifically looking for, and evaluating, potential group identity, and this involves the non-conscious information processes of stereotypes, mental models and metaphorical frames discussed earlier.In this milieu, it’s the specific Marxist and/or psychodynamic explanation of the world that holds the most value and importance, and not specific phenomenon, such as wage labor, to be explained or overcome. The work of Marx’ and/or Lacan can easily become a sort of holy writ, with research methodology or way of knowing focused on its exegesis and the receiving of divine illumination from what Marx and/or Lacan REALLY meant.
Science, with its probabilistic theory and lack of definitive Truth, has nothing to offer here. The truth is what Marx or Lacan said it was, and if someone outside the bounds of group affinity disagrees with our interpretation it’s because they don’t understand Marx, therefore they don’t understand the social/political world, but we do. An important part of group cohesion is the idea that the members of the group have escaped Plato’s cave and know what the True Light looks like compared to non-group members who live in the dark. This becomes a world of Marxist gurus competing with one another in a contest of textual piety, who’s entitled to wear the crown of divine illumination, and who gets to be the group’s shaman.
Education and the spirit of inquiry upon which McManus and Burgis depend get lost here, and discussions of science (not to mention other formulations of Marxism) often take the form of a Marxist apologetics in much the same way as fundamentalist Christianity often takes an apologetic form when discussing scientific challenges to its dogma. Science is either dismissed as corrupt (a tool of capitalism / the work of Satan), epistemologically flawed (there are unresolved issues in the philosophy of science therefore inconvenient scientific findings are bogus / theories of biological evolution have changed over time thus creationism is True), or simply not applicable (science can’t tell us anything about human behavior / only God knows why people act the way they do). Like the fundamentalist Christian, this type of Marxist has a sense of certainty concerning the human pageant and is not willing to give that up or modify it in the face of contradicting objective information.
Combine this form of public discourse with a deep history of anti-Marxist propaganda already at work in the public mind, and McManus and Burgis are given a hard row to hoe, thus a palpable tension between incrementalists and revolutionaries is not unexpected.
Hamilton’s Freudo-Marxist Politics of Rupture
However, with the above being said, Conrad Bongard Hamilton avoids these pitfalls, and his discussion falls outside of the parameters of pure profilicity. His analysis is questioning, critical, internally consistent and cannot be dismissed at Marx-guruism. Most importantly, he’s got something that Burgis and McManis lack – a comprehensive model of both society and mind, and how all the pieces fit together. And it isn’t without insight.
In the best and most legitimate of cases, ANY example of human behavior can be explained through the combination of Marx and Lacan. There are forests worth of paper dedicated to Freudo-Marxist analysis of films, plays, novels, political events, historical episodes, etc., each often providing a compelling analysis. But there’s an apparent and seemingly usefulness-killing caveat for our purposes within a political project– the thing to be explained must be in the past. It has little to no quantifiable predictive value and would thus seem useless for improving the chances of success with real-world political projects. However, maybe it’s on to something, and maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss it.
As an example, Hamilton analyzes Althusser’s use of Lacan’s mirror stage, making a point in response to McManus about Althusser’s perspective on science and ideology. My point in mentioning this is not to comment on either’s reading of Althusser, but simply to identify an instance where Hamilton is able to call upon Lacan to clarify what is essentially a specific psychological claim and definition within a discussion having some practical bearing, in this case the nature of ideology.
The mirror stage is theoretically critical in creating Lacan’s split subject, perhaps the central feature of the Lacanian model2. And from a scientific perspective, it’s completely invalid. Researchers have been studying developmental behavior in children for a very long time (Jean Piaget, Lacan’s francophone contemporary, had his own ideas about child development and stage theory, for example) and there is just no evidence for, and a good bit of evidence against, any actual episode or collection of objective events one could reasonably identify as a mirror stage as Lacan describes it.
However, it’s a useful concept when discussing things such as the inchoate processes of self-awareness and recognition of individuality happening within the young child. These things do happen on some level and in some way, and it’s not unreasonable to want to extend their impact into the world of epistemology and adult decision-making. Most importantly for this discussion, any model science has yet provided of how this happens is too anemic to be useful. So either we don’t wrestle with the questions or we use the tools we have available, including Lacan.
Nonetheless, it’s useful when considering practical problems, such as those presented by an analysand laying on the couch. The psychotherapy example is apt here, as when we look at the quantitative data comparing the therapeutic outcome of different systems of psychotherapy, we find that psychoanalysis generally holds its own against scientifically informed approaches13. As a side note of direct relevance – no system of psychotherapy is particularly good, and there is no therapy that can be considered truly “scientific.” However, it cannot be said, in the general sense, that a person seeking therapy should avoid psychoanalysis.
Lacan created a rich language for, and a comprehensive model of, entities and mechanisms within the human psyche, and thus provides intellectual tools useful in discussion when psychological phenomena need to be invoked. Science doesn’t yet provide a model with anything close to this ability. In his discussion of Althusser and ideology, it allows Hamilton (and Althusser) to negotiate a nuance in human thinking I think might be difficult otherwise.
Hamilton’s Freudo-Marxism leads him to propose a politics of rupture, and this brings me to the paradox. When considering what science has to say, it looks to me like he may be right. I have no idea how such a rupture would be brought about, what form it would take or any inkling of what to do the day after the revolution, but it seems to me that a seriously radical transformation of both the individual and the social is the only way forward.
Part of the reason for this alignment of outcomes between the sciences of human behavior and Hamilton’s Freudo-Marxism, I think, is the Freudo (well, Lacanian) part of Freudo-Marxism. Admittedly, I would privilege a scientific model of psychology over Lacan, but as science has not yet produced a model with anything close to Lacan’s explanatory power, that simply isn’t an option. And a Lacanian approach to understanding human decision-making can produce outcomes with a striking similarity to the scientific findings on individual differences I mentioned above.
Todd McGowan14, for example, in his Lacanian analysis of the American right vs. left on gun control, finds stark libidinal differences in political orientation between individuals. A libidinal difference is deep-seated within the human psyche and highly resistant to change. In other words, McGowan’s Lacanian analysis finds something not at all inconsistent with the findings of Haidt, Hatemi, and Lakoff mentioned earlier – the way we interpret information and understand the world, and thus come to view political issues, can vary radically between individuals and is very difficult to change.
It's the focus on, and recognition of, individual differences and the seeming irrationality of human decision making that I think allows Hamilton’s Freudo-Marxism to gain real traction in this undertaking. While it seems to depend upon faith in Marx and Lacan, rather than the scientific validity of its models, McManus and Burgis also depend on faith – faith in existing democracy and the possibility of its evolution. And perhaps there’s even less scientific evidence for the validity of that.
The form of the proposed rupture, to me, remains completely unknown. As McManus quite rightly points out, historical attempts at revolution have not produced lasting, sustainable societies free from labor exploitation. Also, I think any sort of Leninist vanguardism, for example, is wholly without merit. Or at least, any approach based on the idea that a specific set of new social conditions can be established by the state, and that the populace will react to these conditions in a predictable way, is begging for disaster.
As follows from the discussion above concerning individual differences, there are a couple of features that a rupture must include. It would have to include not only a radical change in mode of production, but also a radical change in the human substrate upon which it runs, and the latter must likely precede the former. Importantly, while none of the authors seem to be making the counter-argument, it’s worth noting that there is no teleological end-game through which capitalism fails and socialism is the result. There must be an intervention.
Building on What’s Common
Which brings us back around, here at the end, to what McManus, Burgis and Hamilton have in common. There is a certain type of what I would describe as a sort of universalist Christian flair at work in all of their thinking, and maybe that needs to be better understood. Echoing Alasdair MacIntyre, it seems to me that Marxism is attractive because it expresses a secularized version of a strain of Christian feeling with regard to the nature of human freedom and value. It doesn’t mean this feeling is unique to Christianity, or originated in it, or that Marx was a secret Christian, just that it found expression there, and thus in Marx, as the product of a Christian (or perhaps post-Christian) western/European milieu.
Also, I’m calling this a Christian feeling, or maybe intuition, to indicate that it was something already there before conscious thought found a way to express it as an affinity for Marx. This would be consistent with the scientific data described earlier, as well as Lacan, all of which argue for the principal of emotional primacy - emotions precede and color conscious thought.
However, this may run afoul of Marxism in a profound way. In his discussion of the Marxism of G. A. Cohen, for example, Burgis discusses a framework in which intellectual challenges to Marxisms can be identified by the degree of difference they engender from a fundamentalist reading of Marx. Degrees one through three fall within the realm of Burgis’ own formulation of Marxism; degree four falls outside of it. There are two related issues of importance to this discussion. First is my claim that moral sensibilities lie at the heart of Marxist affinity, and the potential charge that I might be speaking as a moralizing idealist. I’m OK with that, and it doesn’t necessarily call for a change in Burgis’ program, even if factual.
But the second runs right up against this discussion – a willingness to challenge historical materialism. Historical materialism, of course, is not without its definitional challenges, but let’s at least assume that it has something to do with the idea contained in the quote Burgis provides from Marx’ A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, that social conditions determine consciousness. This is quite a profound claim. I can’t say it’s necessarily wrong, and I can’t say it’s necessarily right, without a leap of faith.
Certainly, it seems reasonable that elements of capitalism come to bear on elements of consciousness in profound ways. But if we’re willing to take a scientific approach, we have to be willing to test this assumption and modify or reject our current thinking about it based on the data we find. And that might be beyond the pale of the fourth degree.
Perhaps it’s time to focus on what unites different strains of Marxism rather than pitch one model of Marxism against another and build from there. Flowers for Marx certainly helps do exactly that with its honest, thorough and respectful (even if at times testy) discourse.
Finally, consider the famous words of statistician and master of the probabilistic model George Box – all models are wrong, but some are useful. McManus, Burgis, and Hamilton all have erroneous models of the world, and I certainly don’t claim to have a better one. The best I can do is offer the advice Jenkins gave – when your model is wrong, be prepared to change it.
1. Althusser’s work comes to bear on discussions of Marx and science throughout Flowers for Marx, as it perhaps should. I have purposefully left discussion of Althusser out of this essay, as it is not my intention to provide a critique of any philosophy of science, but rather to consider the issues of Marx and science from the perspective of the current practice of science.
2. Card-carrying Lacanians will sometimes protest the roping-in of Lacan as a “model of mind” or psychology, but it’s never been clear to me why, other than “Lacan said it wasn’t.” It certainly functions as exactly that.
3. For example, this recent Pew study, although there are lots of individual studies, as well as books referencing them, such as Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter.
4. Simon, Herbert A. (1980). Cognitive science: The newest science of the artificial https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0364021381800031.
5. Jenkins, J. J. (1974). Remember that old theory of memory? Well, forget it. American Psychologist, 29(11), 785–795. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0037399
6. Burgis, Ben (2025). Abstractionism, Reductionism and Class-First Politics. Everyday Analysis, 5 June 2025. https://www.everydayanalysis.co.uk/post/abstractionism-reductionism-and-class-first-politics
7. Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
8. While the UG literature, pro and con, is massive, a good summary of Chomsky’s more recent thoughts on UG, and the attacks on it, can be found in Uli Sauerland and Hans-Martin Gärtner, Eds. (2007) Interfaces + Recursion = Language? Chomsky's Minimalism and the View from Syntax-Semantics. De Gruyter Brill, https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110207552/html. Again, the issue here isn’t whether UG itself stands the test of time and/or is “correct.” It’s the ability of UG to explain data that previous theories could not, and its role in creating ever-better theories of language.
9. Lakoff’s books and publications are listed at https://george-lakoff.com/. Specifically, his ideas on framing, conceptual metaphors, and politics are discussed in the popular press book, Don’t Think Like an Elephant.
10. Chomsky appears twice in this discussion, first as a psycholinguist at the forefront of the cognitive revolution and again as a media critic and coauthor of Herman, E. S. & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/78912/manufacturing-consent-by-edward-s-herman-and-noam-chomsky/. It’s easy to overstate the potential relationship between Chomsky’s work in psycholinguistics and his work on media culture, and for purposes of this essay there is no need to consider them related.
11. While there are a number of essays and other writings by Lippman to which one might refer regarding this issue, Lippmann’s 1925 book The Phantom Public is perhaps the single most direct.
12. Moeller, Hans-Georg & Ambrosio, P. J. (2021) You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity, Columbia University Press.
13. An example investigation of empirical studies on the effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy is de Maat, S., de Jonghe, F. Schoevers, R. & Dekker, Jack (2009). The Effectiveness of Long-Term Psychoanalytic Therapy: A Systematic Review of Empirical Studies, Harvard Review of Psychiatry 17(1):p 1-23, January 2009. | DOI: 10.1080/10673220902742476
14. McGowan, T. (2022). Enjoyment Right & Left. Sublation Media, LLC.
15. Adlai Stephenson quote. sm,
16. MacIntyre, Aladair. Marxism and Christianity, Notre Dame Press.
17. Hatemi, Pete. List of publications, many of which come to bear directly on the issue of individual differences and political affinity. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Ci8Ix08AAAAJ&hl=en
18. Haidt, Jonathon. Haidt’s work comes to bear on this discussion in several ways, but I’ve limited the discussion here to his basic findings regarding individual predispositions. His research team has a Web site, http://MoralFindations.org, with all the details.
John Milton Bunch studied cognitive and neural sciences, instructional technology and learning at the University of South Florida in the 1990’s, earning a PhD. He retired from a career in corporate training and consulting, and now writes on topics he finds interesting, such as leftist political theory. He helped train the first generation of Internet engineers with hope for a more democratic future, then saw those hopes and dreams die. He writes about that, too. He’s also a founder and owner of social media entertainment company Sublation Media, LLC. But mostly he’s a husband and father.
