Science Quote by John Desmond Bernal

There is a provocation tucked inside Bernal's calm, lab-coated phrasing: the suggestion that orthodox "scientific thinkers" are, in social matters, often late to their own party. Writing as a prominent scientist with Communist sympathies in a century defined by depression, fascism, world war, and planned economies, Bernal is making a bid for Marxism not as a rival to science but as its missing instrument panel for history.

The specific intent is defensive and promotional at once. He wants to legitimize Marxism as an analytical framework with predictive power, a claim that mattered deeply in mid-century arguments about whether socialism was merely moral rhetoric or a disciplined reading of capitalism's dynamics. By saying "some way of analyzing", he keeps it modest, almost empirical-sounding, while still elevating it above the supposedly more rigorous minds of "scientific thinkers."

The subtext stings: scientists, for all their prestige, can be naive about society because their method is optimized for controlled systems, not the messy feedback loops of class, institutions, and power. Marxism, Bernal implies, trains you to see structure where others see noise - to treat economic relations as causal forces, not background scenery. That "far in advance" is the rhetorical flex, and it also hints at a temptation: the ease with which a theory that promises foresight can slide into certainty.

Context sharpens the edge. Bernal lived through moments when Marxists did anticipate real patterns - monopoly consolidation, crisis cycles, the political volatility of inequality - while mainstream liberal technocracy often mistook stability for inevitability. He also lived through the era when Marxism's claim to historical "laws" was used to justify disastrous political dogma. The line works because it sounds like humility while smuggling in a contest for authority: who gets to call their worldview "scientific" when the subject is society itself?