A discussion of Karl Popper's critique of Marxism in The Open
Society and its Enemies, and The Poverty of Historicism.
Introduction
In a letter to Weydemeyer dated March 5 1852 Karl Marx wrote
'Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the
historical development of the class struggle and bourgeois
economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that
was new was to prove 1) that the existence of classes is only
bound up with particular, historical phases in the development of
production; 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the
dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) that this dictatorship itself
only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes
and to a classless society.'
Given Popper's reputation for having buried Marxism, it is
disappointing to read the books and find that most of his
arguments are targetted against helpful rhetorical flourishes
which Marx tended to write in prefaces. If I were writing a
learned book which examines the empirical evidence that a train
is coming, I might add a preface which says 'GET OFF THE
LINE!'. But Popper would say, '"Get off the line!" is not a
scientific statement', and be run over by the oncoming train. To
take the metaphor too far, I could add that Marx's train has been
regretably delayed due to the wrong kind of history on the track,
but there are no iron rails of history, and the proletarian train
driver has a notoriously subjective sense of direction.
In The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper wrote 'What I wish to
show is that Marx's "materialist interpretation of history",
valuable as it may be, must not be taken too seriously; that we
must regard it as nothing more than a most valuable suggestion to
us to consider things in relation to their economic background'1.
Marxism should have no problem with that. As reality proceeds
through time, we are able to revise our theory in the light of
new discoveries. Conversely humanity changes the material world
according to the theoretical knowledge available.
Marx's and Engels's statement that 'The history of all hitherto
existing society is a history of class struggle' receives
Popper's admiration2. Here Popper only warns against its
misinterpretation by 'vulgar Marxists' in the context of World
War I.
But according to Popper the economic research of Marx is
subservient to his historical prophecy3. This enables Popper to
class Marx alongside Hegel, or even Hitler, as a historicist.
The trouble is that whereas Marx uses dialectical means to
understand the world's contradictions. Popper refuses to do this
and, in What is Dialectic? states 'A statement consisting of the
conjunction of two contradictory statements must always be
rejected as false on purely logical grounds'4. And elsewhere he
writes 'all criticism consists largely in the elimination of
contradictions wherever we find them'5.
In The Poverty of Historicism, Popper sets out to prove that
historicism is a poor method. But Popper's particular historicism
has to built up before he can knock it down. His claim in the
introduction to The Poverty of Historicism is that this will
avoid verbal quibbles and build up a position 'really worth
attacking'6.
His main problem with historicism is that the future remains
unforeseeable irrespective of the data we may gather from the
past. He then puts forward three arguments: generalization,
experiment, and novelty. In the first he states that historicists
will allow that in sociology we cannot rely on similar conditions
giving rise to similar results. His second point is that social
experiments can never successfully be isolated from outside
factors and, having been once attempted, can never be repeated in
precisely the same conditions. The novelty argument is just an
elaboration on this. An experiment is only valid if it is
entirely new to the subject. With the phrase 'Oedipus Effect' he
puts the case that a prediction will tend to alter the
expectations of participants in a social experiment7.
He poses a dichotomy between holistic knowledge and quantitative
mathematical method and places his imaginary historicist on the
side of holism8. Another false dichotomy is given between
'essentialism and nominalism'. Forced to choose between 'what a
thing does' and 'what a thing is', Popper's historicist picks the
former, mainly because Platonic idealism is among the traits of
historicism - although it would be anathema to dialectical
materialism9.
An essay may be nominally entitled 'What is Whitehall?' or be
essentially entitled 'What does Whitehall do?', but it will tend
to be the same essay. Whitehall is defined by what it does. And
what it does defines what it is. Marx's materialism stresses the
dialectic between form and essence, but this is too contradictory
for Popper.
Popper asks why revolutions are not as predictable as solar
eclipses - as if Marxism were as mechanistic as Newton's
materialism. Astronomy is introduced here because it is clearly a
science in which there is virtually no scope for
experiment10. Popper then points out that social dynamics is very
different. He accepts that typhoons may be predicted, but
although meteorology and astronomy have to be excepted, he
distinguishes between technological predictions and what he calls
historical prophecy11.
At this point he is able to say that prophecy based on historical
observations is unreliable because 'History shows that the social
reality is quite different12'. This is paradoxical because he
relies on the evidence of history to show that we cannot rely on
the evidence of history.
Because the future must bring changes which are unforeseen, it is
clear to Popper that all social engineering is unscientific - and
here he includes economics. Popper says it is not the business of
science to encourage an activity, although it may discourage an
activity. Surely the difference between encouraging one action
and discouraging its opposite is simply a matter of
viewpoint. Nevertheless this sophistry allows Popper to take
exception with the activism of Marx who stated that 'The
philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways: the
point, however, is to change it.' 13
Another 'all or nothing' argument brings forward the specious
paradox that on the one hand, the historicists want us to submit
to history, but on the other, to change it. This difficulty only
arises because of Popper's definition of what is science and what
is historicism. He objects to science having a moral dimension,
and yet approves of Kant's idea that 'It is wisdom that has the
merit of selecting, from among the innumerable problems which
present themselves, those whose selection is important to
mankind.'14 What is this selection if not a moral agenda?
The term 'social technology' is coined in order to be divided
into piecemeal and holistic technology. Although Popper favours
the piecemeal over the holistic, it can be seen to be yet another
false dichotomy given the impossibility of a revolutionary force
achieving a truly holistic vision from 'year zero' and the
implausibility of a piecemeal reformer having no vision of the
holistic implications of his tinkering. Popper's imaginary
historicist favours total holism and stands convicted of
Utopianism.
His discussion of social engineering in The Poverty of
Historicism may be an accurate assessment of Stalin's Soviet
Union where an attempt at holistic centralisation was stymied by
an inability to centralise all the necessary knowledge. Popper
quotes Neils Bohr but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to
recognise that the loss of personal freedom in the Soviet Union
served to destroy knowledge. The Poverty of Historicism was first
published in 1957 following the year that Soviet repression in
Hungary had prompted thousands of Marxists to resign from the
CPGB. There were also plenty of Trotskyists who would claim
Stalin was no Marxist. But Popper can blame Marx's ideas although
Marx's future, like anybody's, was unforeseeable.
According to the preface, The Poverty of Historicism shows that
historicism is a poor method but does not refute it. Popper then
gives, in five steps, his refutation - which is simply that the
future course of human history cannot be predicted. Popper's
historicism, however, is not Marx's method.
In The Open Society and its Enemies he goes to town on another of
Marx's phrases as if it were the embodiment of Marx's method. In
a preface to 'A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy' Marx had written 'It is not the consciousness of man
that determines his existence--rather, it is his social existence
that determines his consciousness'.15 In the context of the rest
of Marx's work this epigram can be seen to be a little one
sided. Man's consciousness also, to some extent, determines his
existence. Marx can be seen to have emphasised one side of the
equation in opposition to idealism. Popper however goes
bull-headed into the human nature debate citing Mill, Hegel, and
Rousseau in what he claims to be a development of Marx's view in
a debate against Mill.
When he looks at Marx's theory of the state, Popper infers that
politics is therefore impotent. But of course bourgeois politics
are not revolutionary - so of course they are impotent as far as
goes the emancipation of the working class, because its interests
are antagonistic to those of the ruling class. Popper, however
chooses to find a paradox in the way Marxist movements have
stimulated an interest in politics16.
Here again, Popper's apparently academic arguments say nothing
further than his own dislike for revolution. He doesn't see the
need, given that the circumstances of the working class would
appear to have improved so much since Marx's time17. But Popper
was writing in a time when trade unionism in Britain and America
was a force to be reckoned with, and the ruling classes of those
countries were competing with the USSR to deliver their own
approximation of a fair and just society.
The then prevailing consensus of liberalism in the west permits
Popper idealistically to call for a state which will enforce
social institutions 'for the protection of the weak from the
economically strong'18. Interventionism would seem to have done
away with the need for Marxism. It seems to Popper that the state
can be run on rational lines and make laws to limit exploitation,
but he sees such reforms in isolation from the level of organised
working class power in his society during the post war boom. As
Marx would have it 'The struggle between class and class is a
political struggle.'
But Popper writes as if liberal democracy could guarantee justice
in 'the free world' and as if it were the necessary antidote to
totalitarianism of 'the communist world'. If Popper's life had
been two years longer, he would have heard the current debate
about the possible abolition of Britain's employment laws for
small businesses. Popper accuses Marx of idealism here but it
is Popper that is being Utopian.
Popper's piecemeal positivist analysis misses the holistic
picture. When he enumerates Marx's 10 point plan 20 he cannot
have imagined that 'a heavy progressive or graduated income tax'
would be reformed. He assumed that inheritance of capital would
be ended by death duties - since repealed. Centralised
communication and transport were taken for granted prior to the
privatisation of British Telecom, the railways, and the bus
services. He doubted that an increase in the number of factories
would be a good idea, but subsequent decades saw the closure of
British industries - a bad idea. The provision of free education
for all is under ever more serious threat in 1990's Britain, and
the employment of child labour is on the increase - especially in
South America and Asia. Where Popper claims Marx to be a bad
guide to the future he shows himself to be worse, and with a
much shorter shelf life.
It may be true that the future holds more options than simply
more capitalism or some kind of socialism. It depends how you
define your terms. The rise of Islam occasionally looks as if it
threatens a new kind of feudalism. But it is Marx who said that
'history cannot be planned on paper' and the task remains for
science to interpret new data and revise the theory
appropriately. Popper was simply serving the short term interest
of his class by portraying Marx as a historicist.
When Popper gloats over Marx's 'wrong' assumption that capitalism
would lead to an increase of wealth and misery 23he was again
speaking too soon - like a fly on the Mona Lisa he seems too
close to his own era to see the full picture. There is ample
empirical evidence to show the tendency of revolutionised
production to cast workers into unemployment. Such evidence is
falsifiable in the positivist sense, and it is demonstrably
unfalsified sufficient to satisfy a positivist. Even bourgeois
economists such as Hutton can see the social problems that have
arisen from over accumulation of wealth by certain sections of
the capital class in recent decades24.
Whether or not capitalism is succeeded by socialism must to some
extent depend on whether the working class will find the
consciousness to bring it about. Waiting for an capitalism to
come to an end is quite rightly parodied by Popper's anecdote of
the doctor - 'if the patient did not die, then it was not yet the
"fatal malady"'. But it is surely more ridiculous, and less
scientific, to propose that capitalism can live forever25.
Popper speaks for his class and his generation when he opposes
violent revolution. He sees no reason why a compromise is not
possible between capital and labour and he therefore sees Marx's
'prophecy' is untenable26. From here it is easy for him to
complain that a Marxist revolution would do away with liberal
democracy. He can point to some disagreements between comrades in
the United States and then invoke the Oedipus Effect to blame
Marxism for the apparent self proving hypothesis that armed
insurrection is inevitable27.
In a seven point manifesto for liberal democracy, Popper imagines
that legislative reform has a future independent of any social
force to drive it28. The flipside of this idealism is his phobic
hatred of socialism which is coloured by his knowledge of the
Soviet Union - as if a socialist revolution in an advanced
capitalist country could take such a backward form. This again
demonstrates the problems of taking a piecemeal view of the world
while making certain assumptions about the future on the basis of
the past - a sin he would happily ascribe to so-called
historicist Marxists.
A similar oversimplification allows Popper to blame German
communists for the phenomenon of Hitler's Nazi Party. He quotes
Einstein's praise for a section of the German church while
elsewhere remaining at odds with Einstein's famous proposition
that everything is connected to everything else.
In regard to 'the tendency towards centralisation of capital in
fewer and fewer hands', Popper admits, 'Undoubtedly, there is a
tendency in that direction, and we may grant that under an
unrestrained capitalist system there are few counteracting
forces. Not much can be said against this part of Marx's analysis
as a description of an unrestrained capitalism. But considered as
a prophecy, it is less tenable. For we now know that there are
many means by which legislation can intervene.' Here again Popper
reveals that all he has to offer the working class in place of
Marxism is a naive faith in continuing reforms without any
consistently interested social force having the will to deliver
them.
When Popper gets around to looking at the labour theory of value,
he makes the common error of assuming that value equals price
whereas commodities generally change hands for a sum greater or
less than their value. Of course workers who are paid less than
their value have difficulty reproducing their labour. Popper
would have it that labour's value is subsistence level whereas
the reproduction of skilled labour in a developed capitalist
country demands tickets to the cup final and new trainers for the
kids. How else could the employer expect any continuity in his
labour force?
Supply and demand may suffice to explain prices, but surplus
value remains the source of profit, even if it suits Popper and
other pragmatists to claim that value is a metaphysical
concept. If the supply of labour outstrips local demand there is
simply a 'surplus population'. Is he leaving social engineering
to Adam Smith's invisible hand? Popper does not appear
embarassed to be caught looking down the wrong end of the
telescope as if society must serve production rather than the
other way round.
Shorter working hours and improved standards of living are
regarded by Popper as permanent gains, whereas the empirical
evidence shows that they only last until new technology permits
the de-skilling of jobs, or the export of capital enables the
employer to recruit workers in developing countries where labour
reproduction costs are lower. In his ivory tower, Popper can
claim value to be a vestige of a Platonic essence.32
Left with a doctrine of surplus population and the law of supply
and demand it is easy for Popper to claim that Marx's prophesy of
greater misery is proven false is refuted by the facts. He
retains his notion of an impartial state, presumes a continued
recognition of collective bargaining, and prophesies (from
historical data?) that trade unions will continue to prevent the
existence of a reserve army of labour from forcing wages
down. 'And this means that the assumptions on which Marx's
analysis is based must disappear.'
Popper has no problem with accepting that capitalism goes through
cycles of boom and bust 'But I wish to assert most emphatically
that the belief that it is impossible to abolish unemployment by
piecemeal measures is on the same plane of dogmatism as the
numerous physical proofs (offered by men who lived even later
than Marx) that the problems of aviation would always remain
insoluble.'34 This is a remarkable assertion, and given the trend
of the last four decades we might suppose that if state
intervention were ever going to come to the aid, it should have
kicked in before UK unemployment reached 3 million. Popper
insists that Marx's theories were only true at a time of
unrestrained capitalism but, in a global recession, a state which
intervenes with Swedish-style counter cycle policy has problems
retaining investment, let alone keeping up its commitment to the
provision of unemployment insurance. It was the Popperian
Chancellor, Dennis Healey, who had to explain himself to the IMF,
without measures for full employment even being on the agenda.
Despite his pretension for intellectual rigour, Popper's
economics is rooted in the clouds. Given the tendency for the
rate of profit to fall, he admits that 'Those capitalists who
speculate on the assumption of a constant or rising rate of
profit may get into trouble; and things such as these may indeed
contribute to the trade cycle, accentuating the depression. But
this has little to do with the sweeping consequences which Marx
prophesied.' This hardly resembles a scientific appreciation of
the behaviour of international capital.35 It is little more than
wishful thinking.
Conclusion
Marx has been dead for 113 years: Popper for nearly
two. Marx had an idiosyncratic definition of history that remains
influential today. Popper and a circle of Popperian positivists
shared a view of science which is already obscure.
In a mere half century Popper's confident refutation already has
a threadbare parochial look. His post war optimism appears to
lack a material base. His faith in intervention is as quaint as a
Bakelite wireless. Despite the fall of the USSR, and despite the
organised working class being in an appalling condition, anybody
persuaded away from Marxism by Popper, was never really a Marxist
in the first place.
