In the last century, the critical rationalists laid out influential rules for how scientists should update or replace theories. As an example of bad behavior, they used the Marxists' reaction to the Russian Revolution of 1917. But their intellectual history of the period from 1848 to ~1925 was comically incomplete. Last time, I added more about what Marxists actually claimed and how they actually behaved.
But it’s still possible the critical rationalists came to a correct conclusion for invalid reasons. Given my more complete history, do I nevertheless agree Marxist theorists behaved badly?
A note on evidence
Marxist theorists have long had a weird cultural norm against saying Marx (or, later, Lenin) got it wrong. Their preferred rhetorical trope is to say that Marx was right all along, but earlier commentators (idiots all!) had misread him. So what an outsider would call a revised theory was actually portrayed as a better explanation or application of an unchanged theory.
It’s as if Einstein had said that Newton was right about gravitation, and his own general relativity was just an improved restatement of Newton. Well, it just isn’t. If he’d said it was, I wouldn’t be obliged to believe him in the face of the obvious.
Similarly, when Stalin says his theory of “socialism in one country” is a faithful interpretation of Lenin’s faithful interpretation of Marx, I’m not obliged to believe him.
The original set of predictions
In 1848, I’d characterize the relevant predictions derived from Marxist theory this way:
- First (I’ll use tags like this to refer back to claims.)
- The first successful proletarian revolution would happen in one of the most industrialized countries. (Germany was perhaps most likely.)
- Trigger
- That revolution would trigger revolutions in other countries.
- Support
- New socialist states would support revolutions in other states.
- Capitalists attack!
- Such support would be necessary because the capitalist powers would gang up on revolutionary countries.
- World revolution
- Once the core imperialist European powers had transitioned, that would effectively be a world revolution (because Europe owned so much of the world).
- Dictatorship of the proletariat
- The result of a successful revolution would be a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” that being a transitional phase on the way to true communism. (I’ll say more about it later.)
There was a wave of attempted revolutions in 1848. Had one of them been in Russia, and had it succeeded, those events would have falsified prediction First. Since neither happened, it doesn’t. (The remaining predictions all depend on the first, so they’re moot.)
If the revolutions of 1848 didn’t refute First, did they confirm it? No, because:
- Most of them failed. (Some would say all of them failed.)
- The French version of an 1848 revolution perhaps succeeded. It did establish the French Second Republic. But that Republic lasted only four years. Does that little hiccup on the way from Emperor Napolean Bonaparte to Emperor Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte really count as a success? Still, despite some proletarian involvement, I don’t think many would call it a proletarian revolution. In 1850, Marx described it as “complet[ing] the rule of the bourgeoisie by allowing, besides the finance aristocracy, all the propertied classes [not the workers] to enter the orbit of political power.“ “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, Part I,” published in January, 1850. Note that this is two years before the Second Republic falls. (His italics.)
So Marxism’s predictions were neither falsified nor confirmed. As of 1850, they had not yet been tested.
A modification (a successor theory)
No later than 1877, Marx revised prediction First to something like this:
- Russia first
- The first potentially successful revolution will start in Russia.
Others remain unchanged – most notably that Russia’s revolution would Trigger other ones and those other revolutions would Support Russia.
A corollary to Support covers what happens if that support isn’t enough:
- Russia fails alone
- Without enough support from other (industrialized) proletarian states and revolutionary movements, Russia’s revolution would fail. There is no other path to success. I didn’t find a direct quote from Marx. But, for example, when the Russian revolution was in big trouble (1918), Rosa Luxemburg “believed the Bolsheviks' errors were a product of the fatal isolation of their revolution, and that its only salvation lay in a successful proletarian revolution in the West, especially in Germany.” – “Critique of the Russian Revolution.”
How does the Russian revolution stack up against this revised set of predictions?
- Russia first
- Confirmed.
- Trigger
- Confirmed by the Revolutions of 1917–1923.
- Support
- Moot. All the triggered revolutions failed. Or you could say “confirmed,” as every one of the zero successful revolutions supported Russia.
- Capitalists attack!
- Confirmed.
- World revolution
- Moot.
- Dictatorship of the proletariat
- It’s complicated. Hold that thought.
But, most importantly:
- Russia fails alone
- Falsified. Zero support certainly falls in the category “not enough support,” yet the government the revolution produced would last until 1991.
To a critical rationalist, there’s no shame in a falsified theory, so long as you react by adjusting your theory in a way that accounts for the anomaly and makes new predictions, preferably surprising ones.
Stalin’s revision
Stalin behaved according to the critical rationalist methodology. Building on some of Lenin’s modifications to Marxism, he created the theory of socialism in one country, which I’ll summarize as totalitarianism in service of speedrunning industrialization, guided by a vanguard party. It would allow the fledgling USSR to fend off the capitalists' inevitable covert subversion and, given enough time to prepare, to win an armed conflict. See Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (2017) for how much Stalin anticipated an invasion from the West, specifically by industrial Germany. To him, fascism was just the government a capitalist system adopts under extreme pressure from the proletariat. So Germany had to destroy the USSR on behalf of capitalism, lest the USSR Support the upcoming proletarian revolution.
Stalin’s new theory replaced Russia fails alone with a new prediction: Totalitarian communism can survive. This was confirmed. OK, it was refuted in 1991, but fending off Germany in WWII is what critical rationalists would call confirmation of a low-probability prediction. There are arguments to be made here. How much of the failure of Operation Barbarossa was due to Hitler being so enamored of Blitzkreig that he left German troops unprepared for the kind of winter in Russia that Napoleon found so… awkward? And: the USA poured resources into Stalinist Russia during WWII. How much does that matter? Beats me! In fact, one of the themes of my next post will be (I hope) how the critical rationalists think weighing evidence is easy, when it’s not.
But what about the dictatorship of the proletariat?
Here’s a question that’s not as silly as it looks: did the Russian revolution actually succeed? Consider the Marxist prediction Dictatorship of the proletariat – which it is now time to define.
Engels described the Paris Commune of 1871 (a revolution that was pretty localized and only lasted two months) as the exemplar of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here are some of its characteristics:
- A government made up of proletarians (who would get paid workers' wages).
- Proletarian guidance. Those proletarians would conceive of and implement the necessary changes to society. Other classes (like the petty bourgeoisie – think shop owners and lawyers) would look to them to chart the future.
- Democratic governance and universal suffrage, which would lead to separation of Church and State, to replacing the police and armed forces with ordinary people rotating into and out of short-term service, and so on.
That is not very much like how revolutionary Russia turned out. Indeed, Lenin in 1906 redefined the dictatorship of the proletariate as follows:
[The] scientific term ‘dictatorship’ means nothing more nor less than authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on force. Stalin was so bad that Lenin looks good in comparison, but Bertrand Russell was being charitable when he said his meeting with Lenin revealed Lenin’s “distinct vein of impish cruelty.”
Was this 1906 redefinition in response to the failed Russian revolution of 1905? If so, he did follow the critical rationalist methodology:
- He reacted to an observation (“well, that revolution sure didn’t go well”) by adjusting the theory about what was required for a successful communist revolution (don’t allow any trammeling by laws).
- His revised theory produced a revised prediction of the nature of post-revolutionary society that I’ll call Dictatorship by the vanguard party, ostensibly on behalf of the Proletariat.
This revised prediction came true. To Engels, the Russian Revolution failed to meet its core goal, the Dictatorship of the proletariat. Stalin completed the transition from Marxism to Marxist-Leninism. The new theory used the same phrase, but with a different meaning. That’s OK, I guess. Einstein did the same thing: his theory’s mass isn’t what Newton meant by the word.
Why did I grovel through through a lot of Marxist thought I’m not particularly interested in?
I’ve thought for decades that Lakatos in particular had interesting things to say about how scientists decide whether to make the big career bet of jumping on a radical new theory. That is, I never believed he’d captured a set of rules for doing science. What he had were heuristics for persuading scientists, ones somewhat more realistic than Popper’s. I started this series wanting to recapitulate and improve on what I’d already written.
But as I reread the critical rationalists, I got increasingly annoyed by how much they were like me in my twenties. My favorite course in college was abstract algebra, and I was a vague sort of Platonist: I greatly favored the abstract over the concrete, and thinking over doing. In my profession, computer programming, I thought that the most abstract description of a program (the “specification”) was the most important. I taught a few courses at the University of Illinois, At that time, its computer science department was in something of a slump, and they allowed “industry types” like me to teach whatever we liked as long as we didn’t expect to get paid. and I remember telling students that my practice was to think about the program’s design (one level of abstraction above the code) until I couldn’t stand it any more, then I’d think about it some more, and finally the code would just pour out of me.
This was not long after I’d switched from programming to software testing. The thing about testing is that it’s relentlessly concrete, and I began to realize that the concrete is full of difficulty and subtlety and challenges – thinking at the abstract level is too easy. The death knell for my Platonism was probably reading philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend’s Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, which is about what you lose when you drift off, ungrounded, into the realm of abstraction.
I believe Popper and Lakatos had temperaments much like mine of the ’80s. That led to a prediction: their methodology would be systematically blind to concrete matters. It would fall apart when it came to the interface between theory and the world.
Does it? I decided to look at their case studies and examples in more detail. Most are of scientists doing things right (perhaps with some bobbles along the way). I prefer to look at negative examples because they tend to make it clearer what’s important to the methodologist.
Their two favorite negative examples (dubbed pseudoscience) are psychoanalysis and Marxism. Of the two, it’s only for Marxism that they (both) point to one example of a prediction whose refutation was mishandled. So that’s what led me to the Marxist Internet Archive (and Wikipedia – that’s respectable nowadays, right?)
I hope this post and the one about the immiseration prediction show that the critical rationalists ignored way too much evidence when drawing their conclusions – a very Platonist thing to do.
If writers' block doesn’t finish its multi-year job and toss my moldering corpse onto the dustbin of history, Haha! A topical allusion to Trotsky: “A notable usage [of this phrase] was that of the Russian Bolshevik Leon Trotsky referring to the Mensheviks: “Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!” as the Menshevik faction walked out of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets.” – wikipedia I’ll next explain the omissions in the critical rationalist methodology.
Then (finally!), I hope to suggest how to use critical rationalism (with adjustments) when someone tries to convince you to risk your career on the Next Big Thing. (Vibe–I-mean-agentic coding waves from the CTO’s office.)