1984: Popper Falsifies Marx

1984

Popper Falsifies Marx

Written as a student hand-out in March 1984 for a first-year course in the “History of Ideas” at Middlesex Poly. When Popper died I offered to turn it into an article for International Socialism, but John Rees declined the offer.

To begin with, two propositions about the History of Ideas

i) No ‘historian of ideas’ is neutral; every historian writes from a standpoint, and uses thinkers of the past in the interests of the position s/he seeks to advocate. This does not, however, mean that we cannot find such work illuminating and valuable even if written from a standpoint very different from our own.

ii) The fact of commitment does not absolve the historian of ideas from certain standards of honesty and intellectual rigour; the most basic of these is a respect for the texts being studied.

These propositions can be examined in the light of Popper’s critique of Marx.

Outside the circles of natural scientists Popper is best known for his critique of Marx. Isaiah Berlin has described it as ‘the most scrupulous and formidable criticism of the philosophical and historical doctrines of Marxism by any living writer’ (B Magee, Popper, Fontana, 1982, p. 9); and Brian Magee states ‘I must confess I do not see how any rational man can have read Popper’s critique of Marx and still be a Marxist.’ (ibid, p. 92) Clearly aspirant historians of ideas have here the opportunity to watch a master craftsman at work. It will therefore be interesting to look in some detail at Popper’s method and approach.

References

a) Works of Popper

A Pocket Popper (ed D Miller), Fontana, 1983 (PP)

The Open Society and its Enemies, Vols I & II, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, (OSE)

Unended Quest, Fontana, 1982 (UQ)

The Poverty of Historicism, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961 (PH)

Conjectures and Refutations, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972 (C&R)

Also B Magee, Popper, Fontana, 1983 – this appears to be an authorised publication of the official Sir Karl Popper Fan Club.

b) Others

In view of the multiplicity of available editions, references to the writings of Marx and Engels will be simply to title and chapter. Other references will be given in the text, or, where the author’s name is followed by (B), in the bibliography at the end of the hand-out.

I) Popper’s Standpoint:

In his autobiography Unended Quest Popper explains how he was a Communist for a few months in 1919, and then, following a violent clash between workers and police in Vienna, broke sharply with Communism:

‘By the time I was seventeen I had become an anti-Marxist. I realized the dogmatic character of the creed, and its incredible intellectual arrogance. It was a terrible thing to arrogate to oneself a kind of knowledge which made it a duty to risk the lives of other people for an uncritically accepted dogma, or for a dream which might turn out not to be realizable. It was particularly bad for an intellectual, for one who could read and think. It was awfully depressing to have fallen into such a trap.’ (UQ 34)

This gut anti-Communism long predates Popper’s interest in scientific methodology; indeed, he tells us it was ‘in part a criticism of Marxism that had started me, in 1919, on my way to Logik der Forschung.’ (UQ 113)

Popper now adopted a form of conservatism that went so far as to hold that members of oppressed groups should not attempt to challenge that oppression for fear of making things worse. Writing of Austria after the end of World War I, Popper, himself of Jewish origin, writes:

‘many Jews, feeling that freedom and full equality had now become a reality, understandably but not wisely entered politics and journalism. Most of them meant well; but the influx of Jews into parties of the left contributed to the downfall of those parties. It seemed quite obvious that, with much latent popular anti-Semitism about, the best service which a good socialist who happened to be of Jewish origin could render to his party was not to try to play a role in it. Strangely enough, few seemed to think of this obvious rule.’ (UQ 106-7)

Popper’s subsequent political alignments are consistent with his early positions. He tells us that The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society ‘were my war effort’ (UQ 115); that is, at a time when Russia was allied with Britain and the USA against Nazi Germany, he devoted he devoted his time to writing a critique of Marxism. In 1950 he visited the United States at the very beginning of the McCarthyite anti-Communist witch-hunts; he notes that in the USA there was a ‘feeling of freedom, of personal independence, which did not exist in Europe and which, I thought, was even stronger than in New Zealand, the freest country I knew.’ (UQ 128)

II) Popper’s Method

It is a normal requirement of the scientific approach that the scientist should indicate clearly the proposed area of study. Thus if a zoologist promised us a treatise on elephants, we should be somewhat surprised if s/he dealt exclusively with Indian elephants without reference to African elephants; and even more surprised if s/he included sections on camels and field-mice on the grounds that they had some features in common with elephants. Yet Popper’s approach to Marxism/historicism has much in common with such a treatment.

Popper’s own account of his method gives us a rather surprising formulation:

‘I have tried hard to make a case in favour of historicism in order to give point to my subsequent criticism. I have tried to present historicism as a well-considered and close-knit philosophy. And I have not hesitated to construct arguments in its support which have never, to my knowledge, been brought forward by historicists themselves. I hope that, in this way, I have succeeded in building up a position really worth attacking.’ (PP 291)

The implications of this are curious:

i) Popper must be presumed to be considerably more intelligent than Hegel, Marx, or any other historicist, since he has discovered arguments which they failed to produce, even though they devoted their lives to defending the position;

ii) that the logic of an intellectual position can be completely abstracted from the specific texts in which it was formulated and the whole historical practice which gave rise to it.

Popper claims to be confronting both the historical individual Karl Marx and the whole intellectual and political movement basing itself on Marx. Yet when we examine the scope of references to Marx and Marxists in Popper’s work we find a number of omissions and limitations:

i) Most of his references to Marx and Engels seem to be taken from E Burns (ed) A Handbook of Marxism (1935), an official Communist Party manual of the high Stalinist period; (OSE II 318)

ii) There is virtually no consideration of such early works as Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), which laid the philosophical foundations for Marx’s later work, even though these works have been the subject of considerable controversy since the 1930s;

iii) There is little mention of Marx’s historical writings on the revolutionary developments in France in 1948-51 and 1871, even though these show Marx at his best in applying his analysis to a concrete historical process (cf. also section IV below on Marx and the State);

iv) Popper seems totally ignorant of the work of Georg Lukács – including History and Class Consciousness, published in Berlin in 1923 – although this work represents the most sophisticated twentieth century attempt to explore the philosophical and methodological foundations of Marxism;

v) Nor does Popper give any attention to the work of Leon Trotsky, who made a pioneering attempt to develop a Marxist analysis of the degeneration of the Russian revolution, and to show that there was a Marxist alternative to Stalinism.

(Popper does note that he had difficulty in obtaining all the books he had wanted in war-time New Zealand (UQ 118); however, since 1946 he has had access to the rich library resources of the London School of Economics, but there is no indication that he has been willing to revise his judgments in the light of more extensive reading.)

Moreover, Popper seems to have very little interest in the concrete history of Marxist thought or the Marxist movement. He refers, for example, to the ‘“Dialectical Materialism” developed by Marx’, although Marx never used the term, which was invented by Plekhanov, and widely propagated in the Stalin period. (C&R 332) On occasion Popper establishes a distinction between Marx and the ‘Vulgar Marxists’ (OSE II 100, C&R 125), but he never defines this category or locates it historically; while it might be supposed that the Vulgar Marxists are Stalinists, the identification is never clearly established. As for the questions of the continuity or non-continuity between Marx, Lenin and Stalin, Popper never tackles the question, although it is crucial to his thesis of the pernicious influence of historicist theories. Popper suggests that Marxist and Bolshevik ideas bear a major part of the responsibility for Stalinist Russia, but never examines the concrete historical process by which this might have happened. (He thus saves himself from having to answer awkward questions such as why Stalin found it necessary to organise the deaths of ten out of fifteen members of the first Bolshevik Government of 1917). In passing Popper describes the Russian Revolution of October 1917 as a ‘conspiracy’ (C&R 125). But he does not deign to explain how a conspiracy could be carried through by a Bolshevik Party with nearly 200,000 members. (One of Lenin’s fiercest political opponents, the Menshevik Martov, had a rather better understanding when he wrote ‘Understand, please, what we have before us after all is a victorious uprising of the proletariat – almost the entire proletariat supports Lenin and expects its social liberation from the uprising … letter to Axelrod, 19 November 1917.)

An interesting sidelight on Popper’s method is given by Walter Kaufmann’s essay (B) on ‘The Hegel Myth and its Method’. Kaufmann, a liberal Hegel scholar, identifies a number of distortions in Popper’s treatment of Hegel in Volume II of The Open Society and Its Enemies:

i) He shows the inadequacy of Popper’s scholarship; his ignorance of important critical works, and the fact that most of his quotations come from a student anthology; Popper ignores important aspects of Hegel’s work and perpetuates mistranslations.

ii) He identifies Popper’s use of quilt quotations – i.e. amalgamations of a number of shorter quotations, taken out of context and in many cases from separate books.

iii) His discussion of Hegel’s influence shows that Popper makes undocumented assertions, and that when he quotes twentieth century writers he is not demonstrating influence, but rather implying ‘guilt by association’.

iv) He demonstrates that Popper distorts Hegel’s view of the state, and shows that Hegel was not a historicist.

We can find many similar examples of ‘conflation’, the association of ideas held by quite different people in such a way as to suggest that they are really the same. For example:

i) In a discussion of historical evolution, Popper refers to ‘Henry Adams, the famous [sic] American historian, seriously hoped to determine the course of history by fixing the position of two points on its track – the one point located in the thirteenth century, the other in his own lifetime.’ (PP 438) The fact that Adams was a crank does not discredit other more serious theories of history.

ii) In a discussion of Marx – and Goebbels (!) – Popper refers to those who believe ‘they know how to make heaven on earth’. (C&R 342) Neither Marx nor any other serious political theorist has made such a claim (though Marx would have accepted the quite distinct proposition that we invent heaven because of our inability to control society on earth.)

III) Marxism and Science

The concept of science is central to Popper’s work – and to his rhetoric. As David Papineau has written:

‘The popular appeal of Popper’s message gets latently reinforced by the way he delivers it. For a start, there is the covert (if not exactly subtle) suggestion that Popper’s own work is of a piece with the great advances of twentieth century science, conveyed by name-dropping mention of the occasions when he discussed this and that with Einstein and other figures of similar status.’ (Times Higher Education Supplement, 9.9.83)

It is particularly important to look critically at Popper’s contrast between the ‘scientific’ Einstein and the ‘unscientific’ Marx (UQ 38). Einstein in no way shared Popper’s conservative political prejudices; he advocated civil disobedience against McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade, and wrote an article called ‘Why Socialism’ for the independent Marxist journal Monthly Review in 1949. While seeking to bask in Einstein’s reputation, Popper does not mention this.

Popper’s principal line of attack on Marxism and other forms of historicism is that they aspire to a scientific status that they cannot justify:

‘It will be enough if I say here that I mean by ‘historicism’ an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns’, the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history.’ (PP 290)

On top of this, by using the concept of ‘falsifiability’, Popper demands a degree of rigour which often the natural sciences, let alone the historical sciences, cannot meet. As David Papineau has written:

‘When a prediction fails, it is always possible, and in general entirely sensible, to query such bits of interpreting theory, rather than reject such fundamental principles as the laws of motion. The central assumption of Newtonian physics were no more falsifiable than those of Marxism or Freudianism or, for that matter, of astrology or spirit worship.’ (art cit)

But Popper seems less concerned to establish a viable method for the social sciences than to score points by imposing a kind of Catch-22. If the Marxists stick rigidly to their original positions, they are guilty of blind dogmatism (‘the mentality of the man with definitely fixed ideas, the “committed” man, is akin to that of the madman.’ PP 364) If, on the other hand, they seek to modify their positions in the light of experience, then they are guilty of cheating:

‘Thus one might say that Marxism was once a science, but one which was refuted by some of the facts which happened to clash with its predictions … However, Marxism is no longer a science; for it broke the methodological rule that we must accept falsification, and it immunised itself against the most blatant refutations of its predictions. Ever since then, it can be described only as non-science – as a metaphysical dream, if you like, married to a cruel reality.’ (PP 127)

This false alternative leaves no place for the attempt to preserve the broad outline of a theory, but to modify the details to fit a changing reality. This is the approach that, for example, characterises the 1872 Preface to the German Edition of the Communist Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels try to reassess their text after a quarter of a century:

‘However much the state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in this Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today.’

In more general terms it might be suggested that, by insisting on a rigorous distinction between what is, and is not, science, and by denying legitimacy to any work that does not meet this standard, Popper is guilty precisely of what he elsewhere calls ‘essentialism’, a belief that there is a single essence of what constitutes science.

A further Catch-22 seems to operate in relation to the distinction between the natural and social sciences. On the one hand Popper seems to believe that the social sciences should aspire to the same rigour as the natural sciences (‘the social sciences do not as yet seem to have found their Galileo’ PP 289). Yet at the same time Popper argues that the social sciences cannot achieve the same results as the natural sciences:

‘The historicist doctrine which teaches that it is the task of the social sciences to predict historical developments is, I believe, untenable….

‘My contentions are two.

‘The first is that the historicist does not, as a matter of fact, derive his historical prophecies from conditional scientific predictions. The second (from which the first follows) is that he cannot possibly do so because long-term prophecies can be derived from scientific conditional predictions only if they apply to systems which can be described as well-isolated, stationary, and recurrent. These systems are very rare in nature; and modern society is surely not one of them.’ (C&R 339)

Roger Harris (B) has tried to cut through the confusion:

‘Society is not subject to unvarying causal laws which yield to investigation via explanatory hypothesis, prediction and test. It is subject instead to history – something Popper understands vaguely in respect of the growth of scientific knowledge, but, for political reasons, will not allow to extend to his understanding of human activity in toto. Yet here is a clear contradiction within Popper’s overall doctrine: if a systematic understanding, albeit a non-predictive understanding, can be gained of the growth of scientific knowledge, through his theory of scientific method, as Popper claims it can, then this is an instance of just the sort of non-predictive systematic understanding of human activity which is supposedly subjected to devastating criticisms in Popper’s own work. Most of these criticisms, in fact, are generated by mistakenly assuming that Marx, Freud, etc. are seeking predictive theories of a natural science kind, and then, surprisingly enough, showing that their theories are not falsifiable after all. But if human activities, like Popper’s own chosen field – the search for knowledge – are susceptible to understanding without the need for a predictive theory, then Popper’s criticism that Marx’s theories are not falsifiable, and his criticisms that falsifiable theories cannot be constructed, and so systematic knowledge is not possible, in the field of human activity, are both quite misplaced.’

Marx, in fact, saw a clear distinction between natural and social science: ‘as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter.’ (Capital, vol. I, chapter XV, section 1). And as Roger Harris has pointed out, the assimilation of social science to natural science is a way of thought ‘in which one’s fellow men are seen as existing to be exploited and manipulated for gain, much as nature is.’ (art cit)

In fact, Popper misrepresents the whole structure of Marx’s thought. As Lenin, quoting Engels, put it: ‘Our doctrine is not a dogma, but a guide to action.’ (Certain features of the historical development of Marxism, 1910) Marx’s fundamental aim is to analyse society as part of the project of transforming it. In the course of this analysis he may make certain predictions; he may make them rashly and they may turn out wrong. But the predictions are a secondary by-product of the analysis, rather than, as Popper seems to believe, the predictions being the main aim of the operation.

It is, of course, true that Marx and Engels claimed scientific status for their work. But they did so in the specific context of establishing a distinction between their work and that of the so-called Utopian Socialists. The Utopians produced out of their own brains a vision of an ideal society, which was then to be offered ready-made to the masses. As Marx and Engels saw, this was both unrealistic and elitist; a ‘scientific’ socialism must be based on social forces and social conflicts actually existing in the present:

‘From that time forward, socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes – the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historic‑economic succession of events from which these classes, and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict…

‘These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries socialism became a science.’

(Engels, Socialism: Utopian and scientific, chapter II)

For Marx truth is not a question of either verification or falsification, it is a question of practice:

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question,’

‘Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which mislead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.’

(Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, II & VIII)

Hence Popper is quite misguided in his attempt to establish a dichotomy in Marx between his activism and his historicism:

‘The demand that men should prove themselves in deeds is especially marked in some of Marx’s earlier writings. This attitude, which might be described as his activism, is most clearly formulated in the last of his theses on Feuerbach: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it.’….

‘But as we already know, these strong ‘activist’ tendencies of Marx’s are counteracted by his historicism. Under its influence, he became mainly a prophet. He decided that, at least under capitalism, we must submit to ‘inexorable laws’ and to the fact that all we can do is ‘to shorten and lessen the birth-pangs’ of the ‘natural phases of its evolution.’ There is a wide gulf between Marx’s activism and his historicism, and this gulf is further widened by his doctrine that we must submit to the purely irrational forces of history.’ (OSE II 201-2)

Marx’s own formulation of the relation between activism and determinism was considerably more fortunate:

‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’ (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, chapter I)

In the light of this, and of Marx’s manifold writings on the 1848 revolutions, it is scarcely possible to take seriously Popper’s claim that for Marx ‘Politics is impotent. It can never alter decisively the economic reality.’ (PP 327)

Bryan Magee claims on behalf of Popper that

‘Marxism’s fundamental tenet that the development of the means of production is the sole determinant of historical change is shown to be logically incoherent by the fact that no such theory can explain how it is that the means of production do develop instead of remaining the same.’ (Magee, p. 98)

In fact, Engels dealt with this ‘fundamental tenet’ before Popper was born:

‘According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if someone twists this into saying that the economic element is the only one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.’

(Engels, letter to J Bloch, September 1890)

Marx was indeed aware from the beginning that any kind of economic determinism not only denied human freedom, but led to elitist politics:

‘The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society (in Robert Owen, for example). (Theses on Feuerbach, III)

It is true that Marx writes of the ‘laws’ of society. But those laws are not those of some inescapable historical destiny, but of the capitalist mode of production which he is seeking to abolish:

‘Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist.’ (Capital, volume I, chapter X, section 5)

As Herbert Marcuse (B) has argued:

‘It is also true that Marxian theory contains the notion of inexorable laws of society – although here it is precisely the abolition of these oppressive laws which is the aim and the rationale of the socialist revolution.’

‘The less a society is rationally organised and directed by the collective efforts of free men, the more it will appear as an independent whole governed by “inexorable” laws.’

These laws are, of course, subject to modification by interaction with other factors. If, in a particular capitalist society at a particular time, political or economic circumstances mean that the rate of profit does not fall, the law of the falling rate of profit is no more refuted than would be the law of gravitation by my dropping a piece of paper off a high building on a windy day.

Popper makes great play of the fact that Marx has been refuted by the fact that his predictions have turned out false. Undoubtedly Marx made some mistakes, notably about the timescale of the hoped-for revolution. But this should not obscure the considerable predictive power of his theory. Take for example the account of the logic of capitalist development in chapter I of the Communist Manifesto:

‘The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it had drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.’

It is easy to argue that this account is truer today, in the age of the Multi-National Corporation, than it was when it was written.

Far from believing that revolutions could be predicted like eclipses, Marx and Engels believed that revolution was simply one option facing capitalist society. The alternative was the destruction of civilisation.

‘In other words, the reason is that both the productive forces created by the modern capitalist mode of production and the system of distribution established by it have come into crying contradiction with that mode of production itself, and in fact to such a degree that, if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution which will put an end to all class distinctions.’

‘[the bourgeoisie’s] own productive forces have grown beyond its control, and, as if necessitated by a law of nature, are driving the whole of bourgeois society towards ruin, or revolution.’

(Engels, Anti-Dühring, Part II, chapters I & II)

This alternative was summed up by Rosa Luxemburg (another great Marxist whom Popper ignores) as ‘either an advance to socialism or a reversion to barbarism.’

It may be argued that the survival of capitalism into the late twentieth century has shown even this conditional prediction to be false. But consider:

i) After the 1917 Revolution, the Russian Bolsheviks believed that the revolution could survive only if spread to the more advanced parts of Europe; Germany was the key. Between 1918 and 1923, three revolutionary waves were defeated in Germany; but the price of that defeat was the rise of Hitler, the extermination camps and the massive slaughter of World War II.

ii) After World War II the capitalist system went into a prolonged period of growth. However, this growth was inextricably linked to the nuclear arms race, a race which leaves the whole world prey to an array of weapons that could destroy the whole of human civilisation as the result of a technical accident, if the radar misinterprets a flock of geese …. or 99 red balloons.

IV) The Open Society

Popper’s political alternative to Marxism is liberalism; indeed much of what he has to say is far from original. As Roger Harris (B) has argued:

‘The germ of Popper’s work, nonetheless, consists almost entirely of various platitudes of liberalism: the “empiricism” of trial and error; the virtues and rewards of taking risks; free competition in the market-place of ideas; reason as antithetical to violence; the unimportance of being right (it’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it); the less we are governed, the better the government; history is bunk; etc.’

Popper tries to establish a close connection between the critical methods of the sciences and the political freedom of the ‘open society’:

‘For the progress of science depends on free competition of thought, hence on freedom of thought, and hence, ultimately, on political freedom.’ (PP 443)

In the abstract this is unexceptionable; a dogmatic authoritarian society is hostile to scientific enquiry. However, Popper’s tendency to identify the ‘open society’ with the ‘free world’ (C&R 371) of the West is open to rather more doubt. Some points to consider:

i) The parallelism of the arms race suggests that scientific progress is not significantly faster or slower in either the ‘open society’ of the United States or the ‘unopen’ society of Russia.

ii) The Economist (21.1.84) reported on the high degree of cheating and fraud in US academic and research circles. One cancer research worker ‘painted black areas on experimental mice to simulate the results he desired’; another scientist ‘faked medical research for 16 years at Notre Dame, Emory and Harvard Universities before he was exposed.’ Explanations of this stress the pressures of the highly competitive scientific milieu.

iii) One of the reasons why the ‘open’ USA got embroiled in the Vietnam war was that in the fifties virtually all the state experts who knew about the Far East were purged for being ‘soft on Communism’; as a result there was no-one left to explain that the Vietnamese Liberation movement had a mass popular base and would be very difficult to defeat. (Cf. D Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, Pan, 1974)

Popper disregards one of Marx’s most fundamental declarations, that ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves’ (General Rules of the International Working Men’s Association). Hence he is unable to see that Marx’s alternative to liberalism is not authoritarian, centralised or elitist, but far more democratic.

Popper complains that Marxism neglects the problem of institutions:

‘Marxists nowadays do not think in terms of institutions; they put their faith in certain personalities, or perhaps in the fact that certain persons were once proletarians – a result of their belief in the overruling importance of classes and class loyalties. Rationalists, on the contrary, are more inclined to rely on institutions for controlling men.’ (C&R 345)

And he recommends governmental forms in which ‘the social institutions provide means by which the rulers may be dismissed by the ruled.’ (PP 323)

Yet Popper seems quite unaware that Marx addressed these problems, not in the abstract, but on the basis of the concrete historical experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, in his book The Civil War in France. (Popper does refer to this work once (OSE II 342), but in chapter 17 of the Open Society, ‘The Legal and Social System’, which in The Pocket Popper becomes ‘Marx’s Theory of the State’, no mention is made of Marx’s work on the Paris Commune.)

This is how Marx describes proletarian rule in Paris in the Spring of 1871:

‘The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the Administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen’s wages. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of State disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the State was laid into the hands of the Commune.’

(The Civil War in France, chapter III)

Note that Marx’s insistence that the members of the Commune were revocable – i.e. subject to recall – precisely meets Popper’s demand for institutional guarantees against the abuse of power.

The Commune experience was seen as central by Engels:

‘Of late , the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentleman, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’ (Introduction to 2^nd edition of The Civil War in France, 1892)

Lenin, likewise, made the Commune experience central to his book The State and Revolution, written on the eve of the October Revolution. And the Soviets which flourished in the first years after 1917 took up the principles of proletarian democracy developed in the Commune. See, for example, the description by an American journalist John Reed (Hero of the film Reds):

‘No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented. And this was necessary, for in time of revolution, the popular will changes with great rapidity. For example, during the first week of December, 1917, there were parades and demonstrations in favour of the Constituent Assembly – that is to say, against the Soviet power. One of these parades was fired on by some irresponsible Red Guards and several people killed. The reaction to this stupid violence was immediate. Within twelve hours the complexion of the Petrograd Soviet changed. More than a dozen Bolshevik deputies were withdrawn, and replaced by Mensheviki. And it was three weeks before public sentiment subsided – before the Mensheviki were one by one retired and the Bolsheviki sent back.’

(article in The Liberator, October 1918)

In the light of this stress on working-class self-organisation and democracy, Popper’s diatribes against the alleged Marxist cult of the ‘benevolent planning authority’ (PH 91) are quite simply misdirected. As Engels points out, state ownership unrelated to working-class power has nothing to do with socialism:

‘Certainly, if the taking over by the state of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of socialism. If the Belgian state, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under any economic compulsion, took over for the state the chief Prussian lines, simply to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to bring up the railway employees as voting cattle for the government, and especially to create for himself a new source of income independent of parliamentary votes – that was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the army would also be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in Frederick William II’s reign, the taking over by the state of the brothels.’

(Anti-Dühring, part III, chapter II)

Bryan Magee echoes Popper’s demand for democratic institutions:

‘If the open society is to be a reality the most fundamental requirement is that those in power should be removable, at reasonable intervals and without violence, and replaceable by others with different policies.’

(Magee 78)

Without unduly personalising the argument we may note that in 1979 Magee was elected to parliament on the Labour Party programme; two years later he joined a party with a quite different programme, but continued to draw his salary (somewhat in excess of a workman’s wage) without giving his electors the opportunity to recall him.

V) The Critique of Holism

As Marcuse (B) notes, Popper denounces as ‘holist’ the view that society must be seen as a totality; and moreover he sees a close link between this methodological use of ‘totality’ and ‘totalitarian politics’. The principle Popper advocates in its place is ‘piecemeal engineering’, that is, a gradual process of social reform. Popper advocates the piecemeal approach at least as dogmatically as any Marxist advocated revolution, and he fails to consider the main objections to it.

i) If, in fact, the world economic and political system is a single interconnected whole, as could be argued on the basis of a considerable amount of empirical; evidence, then ‘piecemeal engineering’ would be both illusory and dangerous. (For a recent argument of the case, see N Harris, Of Bread and Guns, Penguin, 1983)

ii) If a strong enough force has a vested interest in the status quo, they will not allow their privileges to be whittled away; as RH Tawney put it: ‘You can peel an onion leaf by leaf, but you can’t skin a tiger claw by claw.’

iii) The empirical record of piecemeal engineering is not that good. To take a recent case. In 1981 a French Socialist government was elected under the leadership of François Mitterrand. It was pledged to introduce reforms without attacking either the basic pattern of ownership of wealth or France’s place in the world order. Three years later Mitterrand’s policies are largely indistinguishable from Thatcher’s.

However, we must be grateful to Popper for giving us some examples of refutable predictions. In a lecture delivered in 1956 called ‘The History of Our Time’ Popper listed what he saw as the enduring achievements of the societies of the ‘free world’:

‘Abject poverty has been practically abolished. Instead of being a mass phenomenon, the problem has almost become one of detecting the isolated cases which still persist.

‘The problem of unemployment and of some other forms of insecurity have changed completely. We are new faced with new problems brought into being by the fact that the problem of mass-unemployment has largely been solved.

‘Fairly continuous progress is being made in dealing with the problems of sickness and pain….

‘Religious discrimination has practically disappeared. Racial discrimination has diminished to an extent surpassing the hopes of the most hopeful.’ (C&R 370-1)

In accordance with his own principles Popper should surely recognise that his political beliefs of the 1950s have been refuted. To my knowledge he has not done so. It may be objected that he is an old man. But we may recall that Bertrand Russell, who in the late 1940s called for pre-emptive nuclear war against Russia, was by the 1960s – aged well over 80 – calling for direct action against nuclear weapons, and in his nineties he helped to launch the campaign against the American war in Vietnam. But then Russell represents a quite different type of intellectual integrity to Popper.

VI) Historicism and History

Popper rejects historicism because of its search for patterns in history. Yet the version of history Popper presents us with is a highly schematic one, without any of the richness and complexities of the real historical process. The concrete problems and real defeats suffered in post-revolutionary Russia evaporate; everything can be attributed to the historicism of Marx and Lenin. He notes that when fascism came to power in Germany, the Communists did not put up any resistance. (OSE II 165) But he does not explain this in terms of the specific conjuncture, the particular line (‘the Third Period’) imposed by the Communist International on the German Communist Party. Everything is traced back to the original sin of historicism. Popper’s method, in fact, enables him to avoid doing the real hard work involved in writing history. And so we may conclude with Marcuse (B):

‘Popper’s construction is general enough to include practically all theories which take history seriously, which see in it the ‘fate’ of mankind: his opposition to historicism is in the last analysis opposition to history.’

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H Marcuse, ‘Karl Popper and the Problem of Historical Laws’, in From Luther to Popper, Verso, 1983.

R Harris, ‘Popper for the People’, Radical Philosophy 6, 1973 (review of Magee)

P Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, in A Cockburn & R Blackburn (eds), Student Power, Penguin, 1969.

G Novack, Empiricism and its Evolution, Merit, 1968, chapter X, ‘Materialism and Empiricism Today’.

W Kaufmann, The Owl and the Nightingale, Faber & Faber, 1960, chapter 7, ‘The Hegel Myth and its Method’.

A Callinicos, Is There a Future for Marxism?, Macmillan, 1982, chapter 7, ‘For and Against Epistemology’.

See also debate in this book with contributions from P Binns, A Callinicos, C Harman, in International Socialism nos 17, 19, 21

I Lakatos, ‘A Letter to the director of the London School of Economics’ (1968), in I Lakatos, Mathematics, Science and Epistemology, Vol II, Cambridge UP, 1978. (An example of hostility to student militancy by a man described Magee as ‘more Popperian than Popper’.)

For some presentations of Marx rather more honest than Popper’s:

D Riazanov, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Monthly Review, 1973.

D McLellan, Marx, Fontana, 1975.

A Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Marx, Bookmarks, 1983.