The Poverty of Popper

Peter Thompson's ongoing articles in The Guardian concerning Marxism are worth reading. According to his most recent piece he will next address some of Karl Popper's criticisims of Marx's thinking. Forewarned is forearmed...

Bryan Magee's biography of Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, described him as "the most formidable living critic of Marxism". He died in 1994 but his reputation lingers on. He was born in Vienna and after the First World War became friendly with a group of philosophers known as the Vienna Cir­cle. This school founded Logical Positiv­ism, based on the principle that all mean­ingful statements must be verifiable, but Popper disagreed and went on to formu­late his own demarcation between science and non-science. He argued that the test of a scientific theory is not whether it can be verified, since no amount of observations can confirm it, but that it is open to being falsified by experience; a theory is scien­tific if it fits the facts and is capable of being proved wrong. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) Popper claimed that Marxism is not a scientific theory since it cannot be falsified, or else when it was falsified its supporters shifted their ground to protect their theory.

Popper was a Cold War warrior. His attack on Marxism was based on the expe­rience of the Communist Party, here and in Russia. Popper concluded that the totali­tarian nature of the Communist Party in action in Russia showed that Marx's theo­ries were totalitarian, rather than the more plausible conclusion that the Communist Party's claim to be Marxist is false. The Socialist Party has not shifted its ground and we invite inspection of our record to see the validity of Marxism. For instance, the Socialist Party claimed after the Sec­ond World War that the post-war boom couldn't be sustained, that Keynesian eco­nomics wouldn't prevent a slump and that capitalism would seek a way out of a slump by attacking the working class. At the time such a prediction could be seen as being very risky (risk was something Pop­per thought very important to science) but has been more than borne out by experi­ence.

The other leg of Popper's criticism of Marxism stood on a mis-quotation in his book The Poverty of Historicism (1957). Popper attacked the notion that there are laws of human development, and that these laws enable us to predict the future course of human history, and he quoted from Marx's Capital, where the aim is "to lay bare the economic law of motion of human society". Marx, however, actually wrote that his aim was to lay bare the economic law of motion of "modern society" - capi­talism. The economic law of capitalism, Marx's law of value, is in fact quite spe­cific to capitalism and it enables the So­cialist Party to make the kind of predic­tions indicated above. Marx's theory of social development, the materialist con­ception of history, is a method for inter­preting history with a view to taking in­formed political action by the working class. It does not claim to predict the future course of human history: it is a guide to the present.

Whatever may have been his merits as a philosopher of science, it is clear that his grasp of Marxism was extremely poor, though par for the course in academic circles. May his criticisms of Marxism rest in peace.

LEW
(The original version of this essay is to be found in the March 1995 Socialist Standard)