Socialismo scientifico: le due scoperte che trasformano il socialismo in una scienza

“The most influential socialist theory of our age, subscribed to by the great majority of engaged socialists, has been referred to by its founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as “scientific socialism”. In a famous chapter of his book ‘Anti-Dühring’, called “The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science”, Engels points to the two “scientific” discoveries of Marx that transformed socialism into a science: the materialist conception of history and the exposition of surplus value extraction in capitalist economy.This is the most authentic, though not the sole passage in which the term “scientific” has been claimed on behalf of Marx’s socialism. There exists a plethora of articles within the socialist literature, appearing before the 1877 edition of the ‘Anti-Dühring’, that make the same claim. Even the German socialist J.B. von Schweitzer, who usually sparred with Karl Marx, responded after his first reading of Marx’s Capital Vol. I by saying: “Socialism is indeed a science” [Eduard Bernstein, How Is Scientific Socialism Possible?, 1901] [in Eduard Bernstein, a cura di Manfred Steger, Selected Writings of Eduard Bernstein, 1900-1921, 1996]