Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. For today's Patreon episode

I'm going to read the last chapter or two of Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Perenti.

Many people are aware of Blackshirts and Reds and I've read I think a chapter or two of

it before on Patreon as mostly a counter narrative against Cold War anti-communist propaganda

and a real dive into the nuances and complexities of the different socialist states, Western encirclement,

the absorption of fascist after World War II by the West etc. But at the end here he

actually kind of zooms out a little bit and talks about Marxism more broadly, talks about

how it's treated an academia and goes through some of his thoughts on Marxism as a science,

what it offers, what its misunderstandings and misrepresentations are in popular culture

etc. So I thought that was an interesting little chapter and I wanted to read it and as

always if I have something to comment on I'll do an aside as I read through the text.

But this is chapter 8 from Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Perenti and the chapter title

is the end of Marxism, question mark. Some people say Marxism is a science and others

say it is a dogma, a bundle of reductionist unscientific claims. I would suggest that

Marxism is not a science in the positive sense, formulating hypotheses and testing for

predictability but more accurately a social science. One that shows is how to conceptualize

systematically, moving from surface appearances to deeper broader features so to better understand

both the specific and the general and the relationship between the two.

Marxism has an explanatory power that is superior to mainstream bourgeois social science

because it deals with the imperatives of class power and political economy, the motor

forces of society and history. The class basis of political economy is not a subject

for which mainstream social science has much understanding or even tolerance. In 1915

...