IF YOU mean beyond human understanding, then the answer is yes — “paranormal” is poppycock. “Paranormal” implies that phenomena exist that are above, beyond, or contrary to scientific or “normal” explanations of how our world works.

A materialist approach, however, asserts that there is nothing that, in essence, is incapable of explanation although there is a good deal for which an explanation has yet to be generally accepted.

Well before Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 text The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it was recognised that science was not just a straight, linear road to the “truth” but progressed in fits and starts.

Examples include Nicolaus Copernicus’s (and Galileo Galilei’s) sun-centred universe, Isaac Newton’s “discovery” of gravity, Darwin and Wallace’s theory of evolution through natural selection, Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity and later, with Niels Bohr and Max Planck, quantum theory.

All were examples of major “paradigm shifts” transforming what Kuhn called “normal science.” Each led to a new understanding of how the world works. The job of scientists (as with journalists, forensic investigators and others) is to seek to add to existing knowledge within a paradigm — and at the same time to continually test that paradigm.

A famous paper by Boris Hessen, part of the Soviet delegation to the 1931 International Congress on the History of Science in London, argued that science was not absolute, “above” society but an intrinsic part of humanity’s exploration of our own and of the “natural” world.

Turning points — Kuhnian “paradigm shifts” were the product of growing internal inconsistencies leading to a new understanding of how the world works. But a more usual use of the term “paranormal” is the suggestion that there are phenomena which by their very nature are beyond our understanding.

Examples include psychokinesis (or telekinesis, the action of mind on matter), extrasensory perception (ESP, sometimes called “sixth sense”), telepathy (thought transference between individuals), clairvoyance (privileged awareness of phenomena denied to others), precognition (knowledge of the future) and other purportedly “supernatural” phenomena.

Initially attributed to a god, the Devil, or other mystic being, from the mid-19th century they became a topic of speculation and entertainment — from card guessing and fortune-telling to popular media from Victorian playhouse performances to films like Carrie and ET.

Marx and Engels had huge respect for Charles Darwin who helped to put a nail in the creationist coffin, and also for his co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace who, unlike Darwin, became a believer in the paranormal. They respected the latter’s science and his socialism, but not his spiritualism.

Engels, in an essay on Natural Science and the Spirit World written in 1898, comments on Wallace and in particular on his book On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (published in 1875). In it, Wallace recounts his first experience of the paranormal in 1844 when he attended lectures by one Mr Spencer Hall on mesmerism.

Engels had also attended a lecture by Hall around the same time and had tried to reproduce Spencer’s magnetico-phrenological performance sessions  — with very different conclusions. He called Spencer “a very mediocre charlatan” and agreed with TH Huxley, Darwin’s champion: “Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a ‘medium’ hired at a guinea a seance!”

Since then almost all supposed examples of the paranormal, when investigated, have been debunked — found to be either the result of fraud or trickery, or capable of a far simpler explanation. In his own essay, Engels goes further, arguing that a belief in the paranormal and a rejection of theory in favour of an uncritical acceptance of the outward appearance of things as “the truth” are two sides of the same coin: “The dialectics that has found its way into popular consciousness finds expression in the old saying that extremes meet.

“In accordance with this we should hardly err in looking for the most extreme degree of fantasy, credulity and superstition, not in that trend of natural science which, like the German philosophy of nature, tries to force the objective world into the framework of its subjective thought, but rather in the opposite trend, which, relying on mere experience, treats thought with sovereign disdain and really has gone to the furthest extreme in emptiness of thought. This school prevails in England.”

It was possibly a reaction against this “English empiricism” that led to a revival of interest in the paranormal by two Marxist physicists, David Bohm and John Hasted, at London University’s Birkbeck College.

Both communists, Bohm and Hasted joined other prominent Marxist and communist researchers, such as molecular biologist and polymath JD Bernal, physicists PM Blackett, Jim Jeffrey and Alan Mackay, economist Ben Fine, classicist Geoffrey de Ste Croix and historian Eric Hobsbawm, in the “heady years” from the 1940s to the early 1970s when Birkbeck became a magnet for radical intellectuals.

It was perhaps inevitable that, surrounded by the buzz of discovery and innovation, Bohm and Hasted became interested in the (dialectical?) possibilities of quantum mechanics and — alongside their other interests — engaged in a major programme of research into the paranormal, including clairvoyance, telepathy, teleportation and the supposed ability of some gifted individuals to bend cutlery through the power of thought alone.

All were ultimately debunked, though their work remained of interest to the CIA and Hasted clung to the notion that there was more to the world than dreamt of in “orthodox” science.

Bohm is today recognised as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century. He worked with JR Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb, until his union activities and radical politics led to a witch-hunt after the USSR tested its own atomic weapon in 1949; he was arrested and charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions before the Committee on Un-American Activities.

Forced to leave the US, Bohm came eventually to Britain. At Birkbeck, he studied the relationships between relativity, gravity and space-time including “ghost imaging” and “quantum entanglement” — the intimate linking of subatomic particles even when separated by many light-years of space, famously described by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance.” His work forms the basis for ongoing research but there is no suggestion that any of them invoke any “paranormal” phenomena.

Films like Carrie or ET are (if you like them) of interest not because of their “paranormal” content but because they say something about the “human condition” (at least in the US). Red Dwarf is hilarious primarily because of its absurdity and interspersed with social observation.

But increasingly today we’re fed a diet of TV and other media presentations about the supposed paranormal — from aliens and crop circles to UFOs.

They can be titillating, but they’re cumulatively dangerous not just because they blur the boundaries between fact and fiction but because they can lead us to ignore the much more insidious hidden workings of the “dark state” — from Nato’s post-war Gladio operations and Tony Blair’s lies about Iraq today’s revelations about undercover policing and the sinister hold that arms manufacturers have over our political class.

If you’re presented with “paranormal” phenomena, don’t just accept them on trust but remain sceptical and investigate. You’ll almost certainly find that they involve deception (self or otherwise), trickery or fraud.

This is number 118 in the Marx Memorial Library’s Full Marx Q&A series. Copies of past answers can be found on the MML’s website www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk and there’s a list with titles and links at https://tinyurl.com/FullMarxList.