131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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Marxist Science Is Metaphysics
Only when it was scientifically formulated did socialism believe itself in possession of an
essentially infallible truth, and just at that moment it claimed the right to use force. The
scientific certainty of socialism appeared historically after 1848, that is, after socialism had
become a political power that could hope to realize its ideas one day. In this kind of science
practical and theoretical conceptions mingle. Very often scientific socialism meant only a
negative, the rejection of utopia and the determination from then on to intervene consciously
in social and political reality. Instead of being conceived from the outside according to
fantasies and splendid ideals, social and political reality was to be analyzed from within,
according to its actual and correctly understood immanent circumstances. Here it is a matter
of looking for the ultimate and, in an intellectual sense, decisive argument among the many
sides and possibilities of socialism for the final evidence of socialist belief. Convinced
Marxism holds that it has found the true explanation for social, economic, and political life,
and that a correct praxis follows from that knowledge; it follows that social life can be
correctly grasped immanently in all of its objective necessity and thus controlled. Because
Marx and Engels, and certainly every Marxist capable of intellectual fanaticism, have a lively
awareness of the contingencies of historical development, one cannot compare their science
to the many attempts that have been made to apply the methods of natural science and
exactitude to the problems of social philosophy and politics. Of course vulgar Marxism is
glad to claim a natural-scientific exactness for its theory and the "iron necessity" produced by
the laws of historical materialism. Many bourgeois social philosophers have concerned
themselves with the attempt to refute that claim and prove that one cannot deal with
historical events in the same way that astronomy can calculate the movements of the stars
and that in any case—even admitting an "iron necessity"—it would be peculiar to organize a
political party for the achievement of a
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