Just brilliant: Karl Popper's critique on modern Marxism

Karl Popper is a philosopher most famous for his works on the philosophy of science and political philosophy. He believed that good science should be falsifiable, meaning that its theoretical and hypothetical statements should be subject to testability.

He saw that life continually presents us with new problems. The best way to deal with problems is to propose new scientific theories, but that these theories should be continually tested, and criticized in an effort to improve them. We try, in this way, to kill our false theories and our ineffective institutions before they kill us.

Popper's critique of Marxism

Popper also interestingly extended this theory of falsification to scrutinize the scientific basis of modern Marxism, Freud's psycho-analysis and Adler's individual psychology. The following BBC video wonderfully describes his critique of modern Marxism from a scientific point of view:

Marx had predicted from his theory of history that a natural and spontaneous revolution from the working class against the proletariat would erupt. History, however, has shown that this has not happened. Hence, we should conclude that Marx's theory of history was wrong. Nonetheless, modern Marxists have reformulated this narrative, and have since argued that revolutions did not happen due to people's 'false consciousness'. According to them, the working class are oppressed by capitalism, but their false consciousness prevents them from realizing.

Formulating the theory of history in such a way, Marxists' theories could never have been falsified anymore. If the working class were revolting, Marx was right. If the working class were not revolting, the Marxists were still right because it was all due to people's false consciousness.

What is good science according to Popper?

In Conjectures and Refutation (1963), Popper clearly lists up the attributes of a good scientific theory. He writes that:

1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations.
2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.
3. Every “good” scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of “corroborating evidence.”)
7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a “conventionalist twist” or a “conventionalist stratagem.”)

One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.

Reference

Karl Popper - Conjectures and Refutations (1963)

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