Capitalism as Myth
The Scientific Limits of Economics and the Social Construction of Social Sciences
Introduction
Modern capitalist economics fashions itself as a discipline with the same empirical weight and predictive power as the natural sciences. It dresses itself in the garments of physics and chemistry: mathematical equations, elaborate statistical models, charts projecting growth curves or market equilibria. These forms give it the appearance of precision and inevitability, suggesting that economic processes unfold with the same regularity as the orbit of a planet or the chemical reaction between two compounds. This aura is not accidental, it is essential to capitalism’s self-justification.
By presenting its internal logic as scientific truth, capitalism attempts to naturalize its class relations. It portrays its organizing principles, private property, wage labor, competitive markets, not as historically contingent social relations but as eternal features of human existence. In doing so, it cloaks ideology in the language of objective necessity. The claim is simple: capitalism works because it reflects the immutable “laws” of human behavior and material exchange, just as Newtonian physics reflects the immutable laws of motion.
This claim collapses under close scrutiny. The difference between the natural and social sciences is not a trivial academic distinction; it is foundational. Natural sciences, physics, chemistry, biology, investigate phenomena that exist independently of human perception or cultural arrangement. The force of gravity pulls on a stone whether or not anyone believes in it. Water boils at the same temperature under the same pressure, whether in a capitalist society, a socialist commune, or an ancient city-state. These laws do not bend to ideology.
By contrast, social sciences, including economics, study systems that are themselves human creations. The structures they examine, markets, states, property regimes, currencies, are not eternal fixtures of the universe but historical inventions. They are contingent upon political power, cultural norms, and technological capacity, and they can vanish or transform entirely when those conditions change. The “laws” of the market under capitalism are not the same as those under feudalism or socialism; they are not transhistorical, but rather embedded in a particular mode of production.
Capitalism’s defenders elide this distinction to maintain the illusion that their system is as inevitable as the tides. The conflation serves a political purpose: it discourages the public from imagining alternatives by framing capitalism as the endpoint of social evolution. If the market’s “laws” are akin to the laws of nature, to resist them would be as foolish as resisting gravity. This ideological sleight of hand is one of the most potent tools of bourgeois hegemony.
Deviations in the Sciences
The distinction between natural and social sciences is real, but the boundary is neither fixed nor immune to ideological distortion. Natural sciences themselves are not free from social influence: funding priorities, research agendas, and even the questions considered worth asking are shaped by the political and economic order. The military-industrial complex, for instance, has historically skewed physics and engineering research toward weapons development, while neglecting ecological restoration or alternative energy systems that do not serve immediate capitalist profit.
Similarly, the social sciences are not uniform in their relationship to ideology. Anthropology, for example, emerged in the 19th century intertwined with colonial administration, often reinforcing racist hierarchies. Yet it also generated anti-colonial critiques and tools for understanding cultural variation that challenged imperialism. Sociology was born in the same industrial upheaval that gave rise to Marxism, and while mainstream sociology has often served the needs of state policy and social control, critical strands have persistently interrogated inequality and class domination. Economics, perhaps more than any other social science, has been captured by capitalist ideology, turning from a study of political economy into an apologetics for capital accumulation.
Even in the natural sciences, there are instances where political or economic interests distort research. Pharmaceutical studies often tailor methodologies to produce results favorable to corporate sponsors. Climate science, despite its methodological rigor, has faced decades of suppression, denial, and deliberate obfuscation from fossil fuel interests. The myth of “pure objectivity” in science must therefore be confronted not only in the social sciences but across all forms of knowledge production.
This is why the Marxian critique is indispensable. Historical materialism teaches that no science develops in a vacuum. All knowledge is produced within material conditions, shaped by the productive forces, class structures, and power relations of its time. The natural sciences may be better at discovering universal laws, but they, too, operate within a social context that can constrain or distort their application. Social sciences, on the other hand, are inherently reflexive: their subject matter can change as a result of being studied, legislated upon, or publicly discussed.
Capitalism’s Myth of Scientific Neutrality
Capitalist economics thrives on a myth of scientific neutrality. By embedding its ideological assumptions into seemingly objective models, it turns political prescriptions into technical necessities. When the market is said to “correct” itself, the implication is that it obeys an autonomous law that overrides human will, a law as indifferent to morality as the law of gravity. But unlike gravity, these so-called laws are upheld by state power, corporate interest, and the suppression of rival economic arrangements.
From a dialectical-materialist perspective, these “laws” are not immutable truths but expressions of a given historical stage in the development of productive forces. The very emergence of wage labor required centuries of violent transformation, the enclosure of commons, the destruction of peasant subsistence economies, the transatlantic slave trade, and the colonial expropriation of entire continents. Capitalism is not the natural state of humanity, it is a historical construction maintained by coercion and ideological mystification.
Thus, before we can engage with economics scientifically, we must first strip away its false claim to be a natural science. We must recognize that economics is not the study of timeless market laws but the study of historically situated social relations. This recognition does not make economics less important; it makes it more honest. It allows us to see capitalism not as the apex of human achievement but as one phase in an ongoing historical process, a phase that, like those before it, will eventually give way to something new.
The Difference Between Natural and Social Sciences
The division between natural and social sciences is not a mere matter of academic classification, it is rooted in fundamentally different relationships between the object of study, the observer, and the broader society in which knowledge is produced. In natural sciences, the subject matter is composed of physical phenomena whose existence and properties do not depend on human beliefs or institutions. In social sciences, the subject matter is constituted by human relationships, institutions, and behaviors, all of which are contingent, historically produced, and capable of transformation through conscious human action.
This distinction is neither trivial nor purely methodological. It shapes how knowledge is generated, validated, and applied, and it has profound implications for how science is used or misused in political and economic contexts.
Ontological Distinctions
In the natural sciences, physics, chemistry, biology, the entities under investigation exist independently of the observer. The speed of light is constant in a vacuum, whether measured in a monarchy, a capitalist republic, or a worker’s cooperative. DNA replication follows the same process in a slave economy as in a post-capitalist society. These phenomena obey patterns that can be expressed in universal laws.
In the social sciences, economics, sociology, political science, the entities under investigation are social constructs: states, currencies, kinship systems, property regimes, ideologies. These do not exist outside of the social relations that create them. Their persistence depends on collective human agreement and enforcement, and their characteristics can change dramatically over time. A monarchy can be overthrown and replaced by a republic; private property can be abolished or transformed into collective ownership; currencies can be devalued, redenominated, or rendered obsolete.
The natural sciences deal with what Marx would call the realm of necessity, while the social sciences operate in the realm of historical contingency. Necessity implies regularity independent of will; contingency implies dependence on the development of human society.
Epistemological Consequences
Because natural science phenomena are stable, they allow for controlled experiments and repeated measurements that yield the same result regardless of context. In chemistry, a reaction between sodium and chlorine to produce salt will occur in exactly the same way in different labs around the world, provided the conditions are the same.
In the social sciences, controlled experiments are rare and often impossible. A government implementing a new tax policy cannot run the exact same society twice, once with the tax, once without, and compare the results in isolation. Every social experiment is embedded in a moving historical process: cultural attitudes shift, economic actors respond strategically, and political contexts evolve.
This lack of stability means that social sciences are more reliant on interpretation and historical analysis than on laboratory experimentation. Patterns can be observed, but they are not immutable; they are conditional tendencies that depend on the persistence of particular social arrangements.
Historical Variability of “Laws”
The variability of social “laws” is perhaps best illustrated through economic history. Under feudalism, the economic “laws” governing wealth accumulation revolved around land tenure, hereditary privilege, and serf obligations. The logic of surplus extraction was based on agricultural rents and personal allegiance, not market exchange. The introduction of wage labor as the dominant mode of exploitation required centuries of upheaval, the enclosure of common lands in England, the dismantling of guild systems, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonial plunder.
Once capitalism became dominant, a new set of “laws” emerged: the law of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the cycles of boom and bust, the drive toward globalized markets. Yet these laws are not timeless, they would dissolve or transform under socialism, where production is oriented toward social need rather than profit maximization.
By contrast, the natural law of gravity remained the same in all these eras; the orbits of the planets did not shift because humanity changed its mode of production.
Deviations and Crossovers
While the natural/social distinction is real, it is not impermeable. There are sciences that bridge the gap, such as ecology, which studies both natural systems and the human impact upon them, or epidemiology, which examines biological phenomena within the context of social behavior. These fields illustrate how the complexity of human society can interact with natural systems to produce outcomes that cannot be fully explained from one domain alone.
Moreover, some branches of the natural sciences have historically been shaped by social interests. Geology, for instance, was heavily driven by mining and resource extraction during the rise of industrial capitalism, leading to research agendas skewed toward profitable mineral deposits rather than environmental sustainability. Similarly, agricultural science has often been subordinated to agribusiness interests, prioritizing cash crops over food security.
In the other direction, some branches of the social sciences have sought to mimic natural sciences by adopting quantitative methods, mathematical modeling, and statistical analysis. Economics is the most prominent example, presenting itself as a discipline governed by universal equations. However, this “physics envy” often leads to false precision, as the equations mask ideological assumptions about human behavior and the structure of society.
The Political Stakes of Classification
The distinction between natural and social sciences is not merely academic; it is political. When economics is treated as if it were a natural science, its “laws” are given an aura of inevitability. This naturalization disarms critique by making social arrangements appear as fixed features of reality. To challenge the market is then likened to challenging gravity, a futile and irrational act.
Conversely, acknowledging economics as a social science restores its contingency. It opens the possibility that economic systems can be transformed or replaced. From a Marxian perspective, this is not merely a theoretical point but a strategic one: demystifying economics is essential to dismantling capitalist hegemony.
Even the natural sciences, though dealing with immutable physical laws, are politically embedded. Their direction, funding, and application are shaped by the ruling class’s priorities. In capitalist societies, scientific research tends to be harnessed for military power, profit generation, and the maintenance of existing social relations, rather than for the equitable improvement of human life.
The fundamental difference between natural and social sciences lies in the nature of their subject matter and the stability of the phenomena they study. Natural sciences examine universal laws of the physical world; social sciences investigate historically specific and transformable human arrangements. Yet both are shaped by the societies in which they develop, and both can be distorted by ideology and class interests.
Recognizing this distinction is not about placing one above the other, it is about understanding the limits and possibilities of each, and about resisting the ideological conflation that capitalism relies on to present its own social order as a law of nature. Only by defending the historical and contingent character of social sciences can we challenge the myth of capitalism as an immutable reality.
Why the Scientific Method Cannot Fully Apply to Economics
The scientific method, observation, hypothesis, experimentation, replication, is the cornerstone of modern natural science. It is what allows physics to describe the motion of planets with remarkable precision and chemistry to predict the results of reactions down to the atomic level. This method works because the phenomena under investigation are stable across space and time; they obey universal laws that do not depend on human consciousness or social arrangement.
Economics, however, is not built upon such stability. It studies a domain that is historically contingent, politically structured, and reflexively altered by human awareness. For this reason, the strict application of the scientific method to economics is not only difficult, it is fundamentally impossible in the way it is applied in the natural sciences.
The Instability of the Object of Study
In the natural sciences, the “object” being studied does not change its behavior based on the act of observation. A photon will not alter its speed when a physicist writes a paper about it. In economics, the object of study is society itself, composed of thinking, feeling, strategizing human beings.
When economists release a forecast, that forecast itself becomes part of the causal chain shaping the outcome. Predict a stock market crash, and investors may sell off assets in panic, causing the crash to arrive sooner. Predict a boom, and speculative activity may artificially inflate asset prices until a bubble bursts. This reflexivity, as noted in the Lucas critique and later developed by George Soros in his theory of reflexivity, means that economic predictions are not neutral observations; they are interventions in the very system they describe.
This is not a flaw that can be engineered away by better statistical methods, it is inherent to the nature of social systems. Economic “laws” are therefore not fixed constants but shifting tendencies that mutate as participants adapt to knowledge about them.
The Problem of Controlled Experimentation
A central strength of the natural sciences is the ability to control variables and repeat experiments under identical conditions. In economics, such control is nearly impossible. A government cannot run two identical versions of society, one with a new trade policy and one without, and compare the outcomes in isolation. Every policy change occurs in a moving historical context: technological advances, geopolitical tensions, demographic shifts, cultural transformations.
Attempts to simulate controlled experiments in economics, through econometric modeling or laboratory-style behavioral studies, face inherent limitations. Models simplify reality to make it mathematically tractable, but in doing so they embed ideological assumptions about human motivation, market structure, and institutional stability. Behavioral economics can yield insights into decision-making, but its findings often fail to scale up to the macroeconomic level, where institutional and structural dynamics dominate.
Politicization of Measurement
In the natural sciences, measurement standards are relatively stable and internationally agreed upon: the meter, the kilogram, the second. In economics, measurement is itself a contested political terrain. Consider GDP, unemployment rates, and inflation, three of the most common economic indicators. Each is defined by political decision:
GDP counts the production of goods and services, but excludes unpaid labor such as caregiving, and includes activities with destructive social or ecological consequences if they generate market transactions.
Unemployment is defined narrowly to exclude discouraged workers, the underemployed, and unpaid laborers.
Inflation indices often exclude housing costs, food volatility, or energy prices, depending on political priorities.
These are not neutral technical definitions, they reflect choices about what counts as “productive” or “economic.” As such, economic statistics are as much instruments of governance as they are tools of analysis.
Historical Non-Universality of Economic “Laws”
The inability to replicate exact historical conditions means that what economists call “laws” are, in reality, historically specific regularities. Supply-and-demand curves, marginal utility, and equilibrium theory do not describe all economies, they describe capitalist market economies under relatively stable conditions of property rights, wage labor, and commodity exchange.
When those conditions change, the “laws” break down. Under wartime command economies, prices may be fixed by decree and supply allocated by rationing. Under socialism, production decisions may be based on social needs rather than profit maximization, invalidating many price-based models. Under feudalism, labor was not sold on a market, and wealth accumulation followed entirely different dynamics.
In the natural sciences, a law that only applies under one historical regime would not be considered a law at all, it would be considered a special case. Economics, however, routinely presents such special cases as universal truths.
Reflexivity and Self-Fulfilling Dynamics
The reflexivity of economics is not only about forecasts changing outcomes, it is also about theory shaping policy and policy reshaping reality. When neoclassical economics rose to dominance in the late 20th century, its policy prescriptions, privatization, deregulation, austerity, were implemented across much of the world through the IMF, World Bank, and neoliberal governments. These changes altered the global economic system in ways that made neoclassical models more descriptively accurate, not because they had always been true, but because reality had been reshaped to fit them.
This is ideology masquerading as science: the model becomes the blueprint for restructuring society, and the success of the model is judged by how well reality conforms after it has been forcibly remade.
The Ideological Role of “Predictive Power”
Natural sciences gain credibility from their predictive accuracy: an astronomer can predict an eclipse decades in advance; an engineer can design a bridge with precise load tolerances. Economics, however, has a far weaker predictive record, especially in moments of systemic crisis. Few mainstream economists predicted the 2008 global financial collapse, and many who did were marginalized until after the fact.
The problem is not simply that the models were imperfect; it is that the models were embedded in a worldview that denied the possibility of systemic breakdown. The belief in market self-correction, rooted in capitalist ideology, blinded mainstream economists to the structural vulnerabilities of the system. Predictive failure in this context is not merely technical error, it is the manifestation of class ideology within scientific pretensions.
Historical-Political Limits of the Scientific Method in Economics
The impossibility of isolating variables, the reflexive nature of human behavior, the political construction of measurements, and the historical specificity of economic “laws” all point to a single conclusion: economics cannot be a natural science. It can be rigorous, empirical, and analytical, but it must remain conscious of its social and historical embeddedness.
A truly scientific approach to economics, from a Marxian standpoint, is not about discovering immutable laws but about understanding the material conditions, class relations, and power structures that produce specific economic patterns in specific eras. The task is not to predict economic activity in the abstract but to analyze the contradictions within a mode of production and the forces that will transform it.
In short:
The scientific method is not irrelevant to economics, but its application must be redefined. In the natural sciences, the method reveals universal laws; in economics, it reveals historically contingent tendencies. The danger lies in mistaking one for the other, and in allowing the ideological needs of capitalism to disguise contingency as necessity.
Capitalism’s “Natural Laws” as Ideology
Every ruling class in history has sought to present its dominance as natural, eternal, and necessary. The feudal aristocracy invoked divine right and the “natural” hierarchy of noble and commoner. Slaveholding societies claimed that some people were inherently suited for bondage. Capitalism, emerging from the violent dissolution of feudalism, replaced these justifications with the language of science and progress. In doing so, it clothed its class rule not in theology or tradition, but in the appearance of immutable economic “laws.”
The genius, and the deceit, of capitalist ideology is that it borrows the authority of the natural sciences to give its own historically specific arrangements the aura of timeless necessity. The so-called “laws” of supply and demand, competitive markets, and private property are elevated to the level of physical constants, as if they existed in all human societies across time. This is not science; it is myth-making.
The Myth of the “Invisible Hand”
Perhaps the most famous example of this ideological operation is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” In capitalist apologetics, this metaphor is treated as though it were a measurable force akin to gravity. The idea is simple: when individuals pursue their self-interest in a competitive market, the result is an optimal allocation of resources for society as a whole.
From a scientific standpoint, this claim collapses instantly. The “invisible hand” is not an empirical law, it cannot be measured, quantified, or universally observed. It is a metaphor built upon assumptions: that markets are competitive, that information is perfect, that no actor can dominate the market, and that externalities like pollution or exploitation do not distort outcomes. None of these conditions hold in the real world of capitalism, and when they fail, the “invisible hand” becomes not a coordinating force but a chaotic engine of inequality, crisis, and waste.
Yet the metaphor persists because it naturalizes capitalist outcomes. If the market produces poverty, we are told, it must be the natural result of individual choices and competition, not the product of structural exploitation.
Supply, Demand, and Historical Specificity
The supply-and-demand model is often presented as a universal truth of economics. In reality, it describes a particular kind of market exchange that exists only under certain historical conditions: private property rights, the commodification of goods and services, and the widespread use of money. In feudal Europe, the price of grain was not determined by an impersonal market; it was fixed by custom, feudal obligation, or royal decree. In socialist Cuba, the price of bread is set administratively to ensure basic access, not by the interaction of abstract supply and demand curves.
By portraying supply and demand as a natural law, capitalism erases the fact that markets are human constructs maintained by laws, contracts, and enforcement mechanisms. Prices are not dictated by nature; they are the outcome of social power.
Private Property as a “Natural Right”
One of the central ideological pillars of capitalism is the claim that private property is a natural extension of human liberty. This argument, popularized by thinkers like John Locke, suggests that property arises when an individual mixes their labor with nature, and that this right must be protected as an extension of the self.
From a historical-materialist perspective, this is pure ideology. Private property in the capitalist sense, exclusive ownership of productive assets for the purpose of generating profit, is not a timeless human institution. It emerged alongside the expropriation of peasants from common lands, the enclosure movement in England, and the colonial seizure of indigenous territories. Far from a natural outgrowth of labor, capitalist private property originated through dispossession, coercion, and state violence.
By naturalizing private property, capitalism hides its origins in theft and exploitation. The ideological function is clear: to make the existing distribution of wealth appear as the inevitable result of human nature rather than the contingent outcome of class struggle.
The “Law” of Profit Maximization
In capitalist economics, it is taken for granted that the purpose of production is to maximize profit. This is presented as an axiom, not a choice, as if human beings have always, in all societies, organized production with the aim of accumulating capital.
History disproves this. In subsistence agricultural communities, production was oriented toward meeting communal needs, not maximizing surplus. In centrally planned economies, production can be directed toward social goals such as universal healthcare, education, or infrastructure. Even in the feudal manor, the lord’s primary concern was the stability of their domain, not the maximization of market profits.
The “law” of profit maximization is in fact the logic of a specific mode of production: capitalism. To treat it as universal is to erase the possibility of organizing production around other principles, such as ecological balance, social well-being, or collective self-determination.
Ideology as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
One of the most insidious features of capitalist “laws” is that they can become self-fulfilling. By teaching generations of economists, policymakers, and business leaders that markets are self-correcting and profit-seeking behavior is natural, capitalism molds reality to fit its own theory. Deregulation, privatization, and austerity are implemented in the name of aligning society with the “laws” of the market, thus creating the very conditions in which those laws seem most descriptive.
This is not the discovery of an eternal truth, it is the construction of a social reality through ideology and state power. The model becomes the blueprint, and the blueprint becomes the justification for the model.
The Marxian Reversal
Marx’s critique of political economy exposes the ideological core of these so-called laws. For Marx, the “laws” of capitalism, such as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall or the general law of capitalist accumulation, are not eternal truths but historically specific dynamics. They are expressions of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, and as such, they contain the seeds of their own abolition.
This is a decisive difference between bourgeois and Marxian economics: the former treats its laws as permanent; the latter treats them as transient stages in a broader historical process. From a dialectical-materialist standpoint, the “laws” of capitalism are neither immutable nor universally beneficial, they are contingent, contradictory, and ultimately unsustainable.
Historical Counterexamples
History is replete with examples that shatter the illusion of capitalist “natural laws”:
Post-war Keynesianism (1945–1973): For nearly three decades, capitalist economies operated under heavy state regulation, high taxation on the wealthy, and strong labor protections, conditions entirely at odds with free-market orthodoxy.
The Soviet Union and Planned Economies: While flawed and often bureaucratic, these systems organized production without reliance on market pricing for core goods, disproving the claim that markets are necessary for large-scale economic coordination.
Indigenous Communal Economies: Many indigenous societies organized resource use through collective stewardship and reciprocal exchange, showing that property, production, and distribution can function without capitalist principles.
Each of these examples demonstrates that capitalist “laws” are not universal necessities but historically specific arrangements.
The ideological function of capitalism’s “natural laws” is to make exploitation appear as necessity, inequality as inevitability, and capitalist rule as the culmination of history. By invoking the authority of science, these laws conceal their historical origins in violence, dispossession, and class domination.
From a Marxian perspective, the task is not to refine these laws but to historicize them, to reveal that they are products of a specific mode of production and will vanish when that mode is transcended. Only then can we break the illusion that capitalism is as unchangeable as the laws of physics and begin to see it for what it is: a temporary stage in the ongoing transformation of human society.
The Social Construction of Social Sciences
To understand the limits of economics as a science, one must first grasp that it is part of a broader category of disciplines whose subject matter, human relationships, institutions, and behaviors, are not merely observed but created and altered by human society itself. This makes the social sciences distinct not only in their content but in their very epistemological foundations.
Where natural sciences investigate phenomena that exist independently of human belief, the social sciences study phenomena that are brought into being, sustained, and transformed by human activity. This means their categories, concepts, and “laws” are historically contingent, rooted in specific social relations, modes of production, and political structures.
Social Sciences as Historical Products
The social sciences as we know them, economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, psychology, emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries alongside the consolidation of industrial capitalism and the modern nation-state. They were not neutral inquiries into timeless human truths; they were shaped by the needs and conflicts of their era.
Economics evolved from political economy, a field openly concerned with the wealth of nations and the power of the state. In the early 19th century, as industrial capitalism took hold, economics began shedding its explicit political content and presenting itself as a value-neutral science, precisely to obscure the class conflicts that political economy had made visible.
Sociology arose in the wake of the French Revolution and industrial urbanization, concerned primarily with “social order” and stability. Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim sought to study society in the same way natural scientists studied nature, but their work often reflected the priorities of containing revolutionary upheaval.
Anthropology developed alongside European colonialism, often serving as a tool of imperial administration by cataloguing “native” cultures to better control them. Even when it produced genuine cross-cultural insights, it did so within a framework that assumed Western society as the pinnacle of human development.
The point is not that these disciplines have no value, but that their origins, concepts, and methodologies are deeply intertwined with the historical power structures from which they emerged. Their “objectivity” has always been shaped by the ruling class’s priorities.
The Constructed Nature of Core Concepts
The key analytical categories of the social sciences, value, class, race, gender, property, are not physical entities but social constructs. They are real in their effects, but their definitions, boundaries, and meanings shift over time as social relations change.
Value: In capitalism, value is defined by socially necessary labor time, but the existence of value in this sense depends on the commodification of labor power. In a subsistence or gift economy, “value” has an entirely different meaning, often tied to reciprocity or social bonds. Under socialism, where the value-form might be abolished, production could be organized without reference to exchange-value at all.
Class: The capitalist division between bourgeoisie and proletariat is historically specific. Under feudalism, class was defined by the relationship to land, lords, vassals, serfs, not capital. Under slavery, class divisions were directly tied to ownership of human beings as property.
Race: Modern racial categories were not eternal features of humanity; they were developed alongside European colonial expansion and the transatlantic slave trade, serving to justify domination and exploitation.
Gender: While biological differences exist, the social roles, rights, and expectations attached to gender have varied enormously across cultures and historical periods.
Property: The concept of owning productive resources as exclusive private property is unique to certain historical stages; many societies have organized resource access through collective stewardship, kinship claims, or rotational use.
Each of these categories is a product of social relations, shaped by law, culture, and political power. They cannot be studied as if they were natural constants.
The Illusion of Neutrality
Mainstream social science, and especially mainstream economics, has long attempted to model itself after the natural sciences by claiming neutrality and objectivity. This is a rhetorical move with clear political implications. By framing its theories as detached from value judgments, economics can present capitalist institutions as the natural and optimal state of affairs.
But neutrality is impossible in the social sciences. Every framework carries implicit assumptions about how society should be organized and whose interests should be prioritized. For example:
Measuring productivity in terms of output per unit of labor assumes that maximizing output is a social good, regardless of environmental damage or worker well-being.
Treating growth as inherently positive assumes that more production and consumption is always beneficial, ignoring ecological limits and quality of life concerns.
Defining efficiency in market terms ignores non-market forms of efficiency, such as resource sharing in communal systems.
The pretense of neutrality serves to hide the fact that these definitions are grounded in capitalist priorities, not universal human needs.
Reflexivity and Social Construction
One of the distinctive features of the social sciences is reflexivity: the theories themselves can alter the reality they describe. This makes them both more politically charged and more unstable than the natural sciences.
When a sociological theory about crime and policing becomes popular among policymakers, it can reshape law enforcement strategies, which in turn change crime rates in ways that may confirm or disconfirm the original theory.
When economic theories about free trade dominate international policy, they lead to deregulation and capital mobility, which create the very conditions the theories claim to describe.
This feedback loop blurs the line between description and prescription. Social science is not just a mirror to society, it is also a hammer that shapes it.
The Class Character of Social Science
From a Marxian perspective, the social sciences cannot be understood apart from their class character. The institutions that fund, legitimize, and disseminate social scientific knowledge are themselves embedded in the capitalist mode of production.
Universities in capitalist societies depend on corporate and state funding, which shapes research agendas. Studies that challenge the fundamentals of capitalism are often marginalized, while those that support market-oriented “solutions” are rewarded.
Think tanks operate as intellectual arms of the ruling class, producing research and policy recommendations tailored to corporate and elite interests.
Media outlets select and amplify certain findings while ignoring others, shaping public perception in line with dominant ideologies.
This does not mean there is no space for critical or revolutionary social science, indeed, much of Marxist theory has emerged within these institutions, but it does mean that such work often develops in opposition to the dominant funding and publication structures.
Historicizing the Social Sciences
To treat the social sciences as “scientific” in any meaningful sense requires acknowledging their historical nature. Just as the concepts they study are historically contingent, so too are the disciplines themselves.
Economics in the 18th century focused on agrarian production and mercantile trade; by the late 19th century it had shifted to industrial capitalism and financial markets.
Sociology’s preoccupations have moved from social order in the 19th century, to urbanization and migration in the early 20th, to globalization and inequality today.
Anthropology has moved from colonial cataloguing of “primitive” societies to critical studies of globalization, diaspora, and postcolonial identity.
The questions the social sciences ask, and the methods they use, change as society changes. There is no timeless “science of society” because society itself is never timeless.
The social sciences are not flawed imitations of the natural sciences; they are fundamentally different kinds of inquiry. Their subject matter is human society, which is itself a historical product. Their categories are socially constructed, their neutrality is illusory, and their theories are reflexive.
Understanding the social sciences, especially economics, requires stripping away the myth that they reveal eternal truths. Instead, they must be studied as historical, political, and ideological projects, inseparable from the modes of production and class relations in which they develop. Only then can we begin to use them as tools for liberation rather than as instruments of ruling-class domination.
A Scientific Approach to Economics
If economics is to be treated as a science, it cannot mimic the natural sciences by pretending to uncover immutable “laws” of markets or human behavior. It must instead ground itself in the empirical realities of history, the material conditions of production, and the political nature of all social arrangements.
From a Marxian perspective, a truly scientific economics is one that explains how specific economic systems emerge, function, and dissolve; one that exposes the class interests behind economic theory; and one that uses historical evidence to reveal the contradictions driving change.
This requires five methodological commitments.
Be Historical-Materialist
The first and most fundamental step is to abandon the idea that economic systems exist in a vacuum. Historical materialism insists that the economy is not a separate sphere obeying its own eternal laws, it is the product of material conditions, technological capacities, and, above all, class relations.
Feudalism arose in the aftermath of the Roman Empire’s collapse, when a decentralized agrarian economy, scarcity of currency, and local military power made land-based vassalage the dominant form of production.
Capitalism emerged from the enclosure of common lands, the expansion of colonial markets, and the growth of manufacturing, conditions that transformed peasants into wage laborers and merchants into industrial capitalists.
Socialism, where it has emerged, has done so in response to the contradictions of capitalism, industrial overproduction, imperialist wars, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.
A historical-materialist economist studies these transitions not as moral choices but as shifts in the underlying mode of production. The question is always: What are the material forces and class struggles that have produced the current arrangement, and what contradictions within it will produce the next?
This means rejecting ahistorical models that treat “the economy” as an eternal market existing outside of human history. It also means studying how technological change, ecological constraints, and geopolitical shifts interact with class conflict to produce new economic forms.
Reject Universality Claims
Mainstream economics often assumes that certain principles, supply and demand, rational self-interest, market equilibrium, apply in all societies, at all times. This is unscientific.
A scientific economics recognizes that these so-called laws only operate under specific historical and institutional conditions. For example:
In a capitalist market, prices are shaped by supply and demand, but in a centrally planned economy, prices may be fixed, and allocation may occur through administrative planning.
Rational self-interest, as defined in neoclassical economics, assumes private ownership, competitive markets, and wage labor; in communal economies, decisions may be guided by social obligations, reciprocity, or long-term collective survival rather than immediate personal gain.
Market equilibrium presumes that markets are self-correcting and free from monopolies, state intervention, or external shocks, conditions that almost never exist in reality.
By rejecting universality claims, economists can focus on uncovering the specific dynamics of the mode of production they are studying. What looks like a “law” in one era may vanish entirely in another.
Expose Ideological Assumptions
Economic theory is never neutral. Every framework reflects a vision of how society should be organized and whose interests it should serve. A scientific approach must make these assumptions explicit rather than hiding them behind technical language.
For example:
Productivity in capitalist economics is measured in terms of output per labor hour, implicitly valuing efficiency for profit, not for human well-being. A socialist economy might measure productivity in terms of meeting social needs with minimal ecological impact.
Efficiency in market terms prioritizes cost-cutting and profit margins, often at the expense of job security, public health, or environmental sustainability.
Growth is assumed to be inherently good, but this ignores ecological limits and the possibility that qualitative improvements in life could occur without quantitative increases in production.
Exposing these assumptions means reintroducing politics into economics, not as a contaminant, but as an unavoidable fact. The choice of what to produce, how to produce it, and for whom is always a political decision, and the economist’s role is to reveal the interests those decisions serve.
Integrate Empirical History
Too often, mainstream economics begins with abstract models and then attempts to retrofit reality to match them. A scientific approach reverses this order: it begins with historical evidence and uses it to develop and refine theory.
This requires:
Studying crises, such as the Great Depression, the 1970s stagflation, or the 2008 financial collapse, not as anomalies, but as moments that reveal the underlying contradictions of the system.
Examining long-term structural changes, such as the shift from manufacturing to service economies, the globalization of production, or the rise of digital platforms, as products of specific political and economic struggles.
Analyzing comparative systems, how socialist planning in Cuba or the USSR functioned differently from capitalist markets, not to idealize or condemn, but to understand the material conditions that shaped each.
Empirical history guards against the danger of treating temporary patterns as eternal truths. It forces economists to confront the instability and eventual obsolescence of every mode of production.
Recognize Reflexivity
Economics is unique among the sciences in that its subjects, human beings, can change their behavior in response to the theories being produced. This reflexivity means that the act of studying or predicting economic behavior can itself alter the outcome.
Forecasting a recession can cause consumers to reduce spending and investors to withdraw capital, making the recession arrive sooner.
Predicting a stock market boom can drive speculative buying, inflating a bubble that eventually bursts.
Promoting the ideology of free markets can lead to deregulation, which changes the economy in ways that make certain models appear more accurate, not because they always described reality, but because reality was reshaped to fit them.
Recognizing reflexivity means treating economic predictions not as neutral forecasts but as political acts with real consequences. It also means that economic “laws” must be understood as strategies and tendencies rather than constants.
A scientific approach to economics is not about stripping away politics, it is about making politics visible. It is about rejecting the false universality of capitalist economic “laws” and grounding theory in historical materialism, empirical evidence, and an awareness of reflexivity.
Such an approach reveals that capitalism is not a natural or eternal system, but a historically specific mode of production with internal contradictions that will eventually produce its own transformation. It shifts economics from being a servant of the status quo to being a tool for understanding, and ultimately changing, the material conditions of human life.
Conclusion
The central myth of modern capitalist economics is that it is a natural science, that its principles are as fixed and universal as the laws of physics. This myth is not an innocent error; it is an ideological weapon. By cloaking its historically specific arrangements in the language of immutable laws, capitalism seeks to render itself inevitable.
This work has dismantled that illusion. We have seen that the distinction between natural and social sciences is fundamental: the natural sciences investigate stable phenomena independent of human will, while the social sciences examine systems that are human-made, historically contingent, and subject to transformation. In the natural sciences, a law that applies only under one set of social arrangements would not be considered a law at all. In economics, such “laws” are routinely passed off as universal truths.
We have seen why the scientific method cannot fully apply to economics in the same way it does to the natural sciences: the instability of the object of study, the impossibility of controlled experimentation, the politicization of measurement, the historical specificity of economic “laws,” and the reflexive nature of human behavior all mean that economics can only be scientific if it accepts its own contingency.
We have exposed how capitalism’s so-called “natural laws”, the invisible hand, supply and demand, profit maximization, are not discoveries of universal human nature but ideological constructs. They serve the ruling class by making exploitation appear as necessity and inequality as inevitability. These “laws” gain credibility not from predictive accuracy but from their capacity to reshape society in their own image, becoming self-fulfilling through state policy, corporate power, and cultural indoctrination.
We have recognized that the social sciences themselves are products of history, embedded in the modes of production from which they emerge. Their core categories, value, class, race, gender, property, are not timeless truths but historically specific social constructs. Their theories are never neutral; they are shaped by and shape the political struggles of their time.
Finally, we have outlined what a truly scientific approach to economics would entail: grounding theory in historical materialism, rejecting universality claims, exposing ideological assumptions, integrating empirical history, and recognizing reflexivity. This is not a retreat from rigor but a redefinition of it, one that refuses to disguise politics as nature and insists on locating economic systems within the material and historical conditions that produce them.
The Political Stakes
These conclusions are not merely academic. They strike at the heart of capitalist hegemony. If the “laws” of capitalism are not eternal but contingent, then capitalism itself is contingent. If its categories are socially constructed, they can be deconstructed and replaced. If its stability depends on presenting itself as natural, then demystifying it is the first step toward its transformation.
A historical-materialist economics reveals capitalism not as the culmination of history, but as one moment in a larger dialectical process, a process driven by contradictions that will inevitably give rise to new modes of production. Just as feudalism once seemed permanent, capitalism too will pass.
From Science to Struggle
The task for those committed to liberation is not simply to critique capitalism’s pseudoscientific pretenses, but to reclaim economics as a tool for revolutionary analysis and action. This means building an economics that does not serve the existing order's stability but serves the working class's self-emancipation. It means treating economic theory not as an abstract model detached from reality, but as a living analysis rooted in the struggles of the present.
A truly scientific economics is not a spectator sport; it is an instrument of praxis. It studies history not only to understand the world but to change it. It does not pretend to stand above politics; it chooses a side.
Finally, capitalism’s claim to scientific inevitability is a shield against critique. By breaking that shield, we reveal the system’s fragility and its historical limits. And by grounding economics in historical materialism rather than ideological mystification, we equip ourselves with the tools to not only analyze the present but to shape the future, toward a society where production is organized not for profit, but for human need and ecological harmony.
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