Like any methodology, critical rationalism (described in the previous post) has blind spots. Karl Popper’s and Imre Lakatos’s criticisms of Marxism cast those blind spots into high relief.
Each of the next two posts will look at one of their claims that Marxism made specific predictions (as a science should) but handled falsifications wrongly (unscientifically). Thus, they claim, Marxism started out as a science but degenerated into a pseudoscience.
This post provides background for the next two.
Here is what our two critical rationalists have to say.
Popper: Conjectures and Refutations, p. 217.
In some of [Marxism’s] earlier formulations (for example in Marx’s analysis of the character of the ‘coming social revolution’) their predictions were testable, and in fact falsified. Yet instead of accepting the refutations the followers of Marx reinterpreted both the theory and the evidence in order to make them agree. In this way they rescued the theory from refutation; but they did so at the price of adopting a device which made it irrefutable. They thus gave a ‘conventionalist twist’ to the theory; and by this stratagem they destroyed its much advertised claim to scientific status.
Lakatos: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Philosophical Papers: Volume 1), J. Worrall and G. Currie (eds.), 1978, pp. 4-5
Has…Marxism ever predicted a stunning novel fact successfully Never! It has some famous unsuccessful predictions. It predicted the absolute impoverishment of the working class. It predicted that the first socialist revolution would take place in the industrially most developed society. It predicted […] Thus the early predictions of Marxism were bold and stunning but they failed. Marxists explained all their failures […] But their auxiliary hypotheses were all cooked up after the event to protect Marxian theory from the facts. The Newtonian programme led to novel facts; the Marxian lagged behind the facts and has been running fast to catch up with them.
(I’ve emphasized the two predictions I’ll cover in the two posts.)
Disclaimer 1
I have no dog in this fight. I’m emotionally more of a Kevin Carson-style market anarchist than a Marxist. Since I don’t actually believe market anarchism is workable, I fall back on old-fashioned Millsian liberalism. I mention this to explain why my understanding of Marx and Marxism is shallow and haphazard compared to my reading of Lakatos and Popper, which could also be more thorough – had I world enough and time.
Disclaimer 2
It’s easy to attribute P&Ls distaste for Marxism to their personal histories. However, they would consider such psychologizing out of bounds, so I’ll play by their rules in the next two posts.
Not pictured: my calf in its mouth
But you may be curious about their personal history with Marxism (or, strictly, Marxism-Leninism / Stalinism). It gave them completely understandable reasons to lash out at Marxism in the same way that I’ve never been fond of German Shepherds since one caused me to get 36 stitches in my leg.
Here’s a bit from the Stanford Encyclopedia’s article on Popper (section 2):
His teenage flirtation with Marxism left him thoroughly familiar with the Marxian dialectical view of economics, class-war, and history. But he was appalled by the failure of the democratic parties to stem the rising tide of fascism in Austria in the 1920s and 1930s, and the effective welcome extended to it by the Marxists, who regarded fascism as a necessary dialectical step towards the implosion of capitalism and the ultimate victory of communism. [Emphasis mine.]
[Popper] knew that the riot instigators were swayed by the Marxist doctrine that class struggle would produce vastly more dead men than the inevitable revolution brought about as quickly as possible, and so had no scruples to put the life of the rioters at risk to achieve their selfish goal of becoming the future leaders of the working class.
So Popper joins George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia) as someone unimpressed by Stalinism in practice and theory. Orwell wrote: “Why I write”
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
Popper went further than Orwell and abandoned the “beautiful dream” of socialism, finding it inherently incompatible with individual liberty and democracy. It’s a bit amusing that he didn’t blame Lenin and Stalin so much as Plato, Hegel, and Marx for their “teleological historicism.” The guy aggressively wanted to live in his head.
Lakatos was younger than Popper and had an even worse experience with Stalin and then Khrushchev: Quotes from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Lakatos.
But in the earlier and Hungarian phase of his life, Lakatos was a Stalinist revolutionary, the leader of a communist cell […]
Stalin took over Hungary, as Lakatos wanted, but then:
[Lakatos] was arrested in April 1950 on charges of revisionism and, after a period in the cellars of the secret police (including, of course, torture), he was condemned to the prison camp at Recsk. […] After his release from Recsk in September 1953 (minus several teeth), Lakatos remained for a while, a loyal Stalinist.
A few years after Stalin’s death (1953), Khrushchev made a famous speech (1956) denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and its consequences. Hungary’s government was very Stalinist, so non-government Hungarians pursued “de-Stalinization” with vigor. “Not so fast,” said Khrushchev, and invaded to stop the popular revolt. So:
Lakatos left Hungary in November 1956 after the Soviet Union crushed the short-lived Hungarian revolution. He walked across the border into Austria with his wife and her parents.
One must forgive Lakatos for not viewing the Soviet Union and its intellectual influences favorably. “By their fruits ye shall know them.”