How do Marxists repond to Karl Popper's criticisms of Marxism.

[TaylorS]

Karl Popper in his book The Open Society And It's Enemies criticizes Marxism as being an unfalsifiable "totalizing ideology", claiming that we can dismiss any criticism as bourgeois ideology. This is part of his more general critique of "Historicism".

This is something that has really bothered me for a while. because I can't see anything wrong with his argument.

[The Idler]

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/subject/karl-popper
and in print form
http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-wilmott...-21104785.html

Many critics see Marxism as a theory of iron determinism which regards men as puppets pulled by the strings of historical necessity. Mr. R. K. Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies, believes that too. One could say why bother about such palpable errors? The pity of it is not that Mr. Popper has written it but many who read him might come to believe it.
Mr. Popper holds that Marxist historicism is fatalism. He also holds that it helps to generate beliefs that men are mere instruments of impersonal forces. Such views, he thinks, tend towards men coming to accept a collective tyranny called by him, "the closed society" as against the "open society" where democracy and toleration prevail.
Mr. Popper is a Christian toreador who seizes the Marxist bull by the historic horns by declaring there can be no concrete history of mankind. "Such a concrete history would have to be the history of all men; of all human hope, struggle and suffering" (p. 270). We are also told "it would have to be the life of the unknown individual man . . . this is the real content of human experience down the ages" (p. 272). Thus does Mr. Popper consign history to the unknown and unknowable. There are, he tells us, separate histories, viz., the histories of politics, technocracy, art, economics, poetry, etc. Such histories, he thinks, should be studied and interpreted from our own standpoint. We can, for example, interpret the history of political power in the light of "our struggle for the open society." While history vide Mr. Popper "has no meaning, in this way we can give meaning to it."

...

[Red Economist]

Karl Popper in his book The Open Society And It's Enemies criticizes Marxism as being an unfalsifiable "totalizing ideology", claiming that we can dismiss any criticism as bourgeois ideology. This is part of his more general critique of "Historicism".

This is something that has really bothered me for a while. because I can't see anything wrong with his argument.

Basically, it's a mess.

There are very few people who have offered criticisms of Poppers ideas. To the large extent his conception of falsifiable hypothesis has been accepted into the philosophy of science without much question, even though very few theories would fit it.

A very crude Marxist criticism is that 'falsification' leads to an 'either-or' assumption about the nature of truth; someone is either true or false, where as often it is a question of degrees.

The concept of 'falsification' leads to a rather bizarre conclusion; knowledge is the reduction of ignorance as opposed to the growth in our understanding or truth. This generally fails to take into account the 'success' as proof of the validity of the scientific method over the past two-three centuries.

His argument is that Marxism has a confirmation bias, similar to a religious prophesy which therefore makes it unfalsifiable. The problem is that what doesn't have a confirmation bias? The only way to demonstrate the truth of an idea is to prove it in practice. This is true for religious, liberal and communist ideologies.

This is a particular problem in social science (hence his criticism of historicism): if we argue X will happen in the future, the only way we can be sure is by trying to do X because humans are both observing a social-historical phenemona whilst being part of it. For a philosophical determinist, this 'proves' the validity of the original hypothesis, whereas for an indeterminist who believes in free will, it is a self-fulfilling prophesy which are person acted on in the first place. Historicism belongs to the determinist school of thought and Poppers liberalism to indeterminism.

On the relationship between totalitarianism and historicism, I would briefly note that totalitarian 'world-views' are a pretty good description of virtually all religious beliefs before liberal secularism. Morality and law were not separate disciplines until (I think) the nineteenth century and this is a peculiar feature of liberal secularism in which the law is public whilst morality is private or individual; hence any attempt to enforce a public morality is crudely speaking totalitarian.
Totalitarianism is in most respect a twentieth century theocracy; X is the one true faith, and we will kill everyone who doesn't fit into it, agrees with it or deviates from the established creed. of course persecution is not a 'rational' social process and ends up swallowing up lots of innocent people in the process.

Many religions are considered forms of 'magical thinking' (attributing cause to coincidence), but this is based on the assumption that we have a correct understanding of the laws of nature. The conception of these laws originated from philosophical discussions of 'natural philosophy' which evolved into 'natural science' (dumping the philosophical component as science became institutionalised and it's method established). Science therefore stills ultimately rests on certian philosophical assumptions about the nature of reality which originate subjectively from an individual/given historical period.
It is also important to note that Liberalism began by making historicist assumptions because liberal societies were supposed to be the result of natural law which realized the natural rights of an individual. This aspect of classical liberalism was dumped when liberalism itself became established in the mid-nineteenth century after they had had their revolutions.

Marxism begins by making certain assumptions about the nature of society, which have logical conclusions; capitalism has internal contradictions, therefore it will end in a communist revolution. Regardless as to whether they are true or not, Marxists- like all religions and ideologists before them- have to act on their position to discover whether it is valid. They could ultimately be false or on partially true and that is something we cannot control.

In the end Falsification ignores the role of subjectivity in human thought; we have to believe something in order to recognize it as true, including 'scientific' facts, because truth is discovered by human beings (even thought it will always have been their to be discovered in the first place). This however pretty much kills any belief Marxism as a positivist science (and positivism more generally), but still leaves space to much more limited claims about the ability of dialectical reasoning to make predictions.

Popper is in many respects right, but it rests on some rather 'dodgy' assumptions which are widely accepted and therefore make things appear simpler than they really are. It is better to think of historicism as a philosophical art (with all the uncertainty) rather than a 'science' as science has taken on some distinctly authoritarian, dogmatic and absolutist claims of truth in the twentieth century not unlike religion in previous centuries (at least popular science that is, because people don't explain the complexity of the problems involved).

[ckaihatsu]

There are very few people who have offered criticisms of Poppers ideas. To the large extent his conception of falsifiable hypothesis has been accepted into the philosophy of science without much question, even though very few theories would fit it.

A very crude Marxist criticism is that 'falsification' leads to an 'either-or' assumption about the nature of truth; someone is either true or false, where as often it is a question of degrees.

The concept of 'falsification' leads to a rather bizarre conclusion; knowledge is the reduction of ignorance as opposed to the growth in our understanding or truth. This generally fails to take into account the 'success' as proof of the validity of the scientific method over the past two-three centuries.

His argument is that Marxism has a confirmation bias, similar to a religious prophesy which therefore makes it unfalsifiable. The problem is that what doesn't have a confirmation bias? The only way to demonstrate the truth of an idea is to prove it in practice. This is true for religious, liberal and communist ideologies.

Thank you.

Since Marxism -- *like* religious belief -- is *so* comprehensive in its take on all aspects of individual and social existence, it can be termed 'paradigmatic' -- and also 'unfalsifiable', because of its all-encompassing nature.

We could call Marxism a 'societal paradigm', and also call religious thought a 'societal paradigm' -- the difference is that religion has already been historically manifested, whereas Marxism has not.

What's *really* at stake here is whether Marxism (or whatever) has *explanatory power* -- validity -- when applied (top-down)(deductively) to specific cases, and in actually being consistent (bottom-up)(inductively) across any collection of real-world phenomena.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning


Generalizations-Characterizations




[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Popper is some weak-ass shit, and, ironically, simply presents the flip-side of the vulgar-Marxist coin, where social life is confronted as "atomic" rather than as a totality. His social thought, not surprisingly bares striking similarity to his ahistorical understandings of science, premised on an ever-progressive falsification, rather than a social movement of paradigms.

All of this just reminds me of how badly I need to get around to reading Thomas Kuhn.

I swear I'll start as soon as I finish the Foucalt I'm reading.
Yes, this is totally trollbait for all the enlightenment-lovin' progress-hungry vulgar Marxists who are afraid of anything "continental" or "post-modern".

[Thirsty Crow]

His argument is that Marxism has a confirmation bias, similar to a religious prophesy which therefore makes it unfalsifiable. The problem is that what doesn't have a confirmation bias? The only way to demonstrate the truth of an idea is to prove it in practice. This is true for religious, liberal and communist ideologies.

This is misleading.

First, there is a functional difference between Marxism - or historical materialism - as a paradigm, with its concrete applications(which I would hope tend to be based not on a priori dogmatism and elaborate language tricks as "proof"), and communist political practice (what you call ideology).

How can I demonstrate the truth value of a proposition in practice, human practice, apart from applying the tools which are historically developed, such as the microscope in testing the proposition? This surely can be taken to mean that propositions aren't tested, and can't be, by some kind of an "internal" process of logical thinking-it-through - we really have to see what the world is like. That is a common sense and useful interpretation of "truth-in-practice".

This is a particular problem in social science (hence his criticism of historicism): if we argue X will happen in the future, the only way we can be sure is by trying to do X because humans are both observing a social-historical phenemona whilst being part of it. For a philosophical determinist, this 'proves' the validity of the original hypothesis, whereas for an indeterminist who believes in free will, it is a self-fulfilling prophesy which are person acted on in the first place.

Consider the example of the prediction of crises of accumulation, or any other form of economic disturbance.
The picture presented above clearly doesn't hold since it would presuppose a sufficient economic basis for the researcher to act as a lever in this sense. How do you propose a Marxist criticizing contemporary political economy and studying the patterns of accumulation go about provoking the crisis?

What this means that the picture is very far from a self-fulfilling prophecy - it's that of people who study the development of accumulation and thus posit falsifiable theses.

And finally, in conjunction with this problematic introduction of practice into play here, what would you say about the old Ptolemaic system making successful predictions? Does that mean that practice has confirmed it?

Marxism begins by making certain assumptions about the nature of society, which have logical conclusions; capitalism has internal contradictions, therefore it will end in a communist revolution.

And here we have a falsifiable thesis. Though, that depends on what do we consider "Marxism" (are there Marxisms?).
To reiterate what I wrote above, the assumptions from which Marxism (should) start(s) are real assumptions - living men and their mutual interaction in producing the means of production and subsistence and their social relations with it, as it is.
After the study of this specific society, the conclusion is that capital presents the barrier to capital accumulation - inherently crisis prone etc.

But the important point is that your conclusion, which implies the inevitability of communist revolution, is false and born from the specific teleological interpretation of the materialist conception of history and the analysis of capital. Indeed, there is good reason, common sense that is, to rely on historical experience and cast serious doubt over such idealist optimism.

[Strannik]

The problem with Popper's falsification criterion becomes apparent when you see that what he says about historical materialism also applies to theory of evolution. He belongs in my opinion to same group of anticommunists as Hayek - their criticism within the limits of their argument may be logically sound, but their premises themselves are false. Both Popper and Hayek set up a vulgar idealistic model of Marxist thought and counterpose to it idealistic liberal-capitalistic counterargument, neither of which has anything to do with actually existing world.

[Dagoth Ur]

Positivism overall ignores how science works. It's a shit attempt at enforcing a philosophy onto science.

Marxism is clearly falsifiable (if only the capitalists were able to solve class contradiction... somehow) but I wouldn't say the same of Diamat. But like quantum physics how the shit would you even approach it? I know Rosa L has tried (extensively) but I've never been convinced.

[Red Economist]

Some good points Linksradical.

Originally Posted by Red Economist
His argument is that Marxism has a confirmation bias, similar to a religious prophesy which therefore makes it unfalsifiable. The problem is that what doesn't have a confirmation bias? The only way to demonstrate the truth of an idea is to prove it in practice. This is true for religious, liberal and communist ideologies. This is misleading.

First, there is a functional difference between Marxism - or historical materialism - as a paradigm, with its concrete applications(which I would hope tend to be based not on a priori dogmatism and elaborate language tricks as "proof"), and communist political practice (what you call ideology).

How can I demonstrate the truth value of a proposition in practice, human practice, apart from applying the tools which are historically developed, such as the microscope in testing the proposition? This surely can be taken to mean that propositions aren't tested, and can't be, by some kind of an "internal" process of logical thinking-it-through - we really have to see what the world is like. That is a common sense and useful interpretation of "truth-in-practice".

I am not sure that you can necessarily separate the belief from the action. Firstly the concept of dogmatism appears to be a 'positivist' attack on "non-scientific" belief systems. Natural science begins with certain assumptions about the nature of reality, which can therefore be tested.

Some propositions cannot be tested as they exist in the mind. Can we test to discover our own existence? no. it is the question of how we define existence or non-existence as an abstract concept that defines our existence. In practice, we cannot discover our existence or non-existence, but only the conditions under which we exist, based on the assumption that we do in fact exist.

[I'm clearly in Idealist territory here, opps!]

Originally Posted by Red Economist
This is a particular problem in social science (hence his criticism of historicism): if we argue X will happen in the future, the only way we can be sure is by trying to do X because humans are both observing a social-historical phenemona whilst being part of it. For a philosophical determinist, this 'proves' the validity of the original hypothesis, whereas for an indeterminist who believes in free will, it is a self-fulfilling prophesy which are person acted on in the first place. Consider the example of the prediction of crises of accumulation, or any other form of economic disturbance.

The picture presented above clearly doesn't hold since it would presuppose a sufficient economic basis for the researcher to act as a lever in this sense. How do you propose a Marxist criticizing contemporary political economy and studying the patterns of accumulation go about provoking the crisis?
What this means that the picture is very far from a self-fulfilling prophecy - it's that of people who study the development of accumulation and thus posit falsifiable theses.

well spotted. my analysis is not consistent with the assumption that economics is objective and independent of the will of an individual.

however, whilst an individual Marxist cannot provoke a crisis, given that an economic crisis is a social phenomena, he may participate in the economic system in such a way as to accelerate a process which is already occurring.

e.g. take out a sub-prime mortgage, which adds to the overall quantity of debt within the financial system.

And finally, in conjunction with this problematic introduction of practice into play here, what would you say about the old Ptolemaic system making successful predictions? Does that mean that practice has confirmed it?

not a clue! but I'm just guessing from a quick search on Wikipedia you mean the Geocentric model (where the earth is the center of the universe).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model

WIKIPEDIA

Two commonly made observations supported the idea that Earth was the center of the Universe. The first observation was that the stars, the sun, and planets appear to revolve around Earth each day, making Earth the center of that system. Further, every star was on a "stellar" or "celestial" sphere, of which the earth was the center, that rotated each day, using a line through the north and south pole as an axis. The stars closest to the equator appeared to rise and fall the greatest distance, but each star circled back to its rising point each day.[2] The second common notion supporting the geocentric model was that the Earth does not seem to move from the perspective of an Earth bound observer, and that it is solid, stable, and unmoving. In other words, it is completely at rest.

If the above statements are objectively true, (I'm not as astronomer) I would say that "Practice" has confirmed the Geocentric model and could make successful predictions.
What matters here is the paradign shift in recognizing that the apparent stationary position of the earth is not an objective phenomena (i.e the earth is not the center of the universe), but that this is a subjective phenemona (e.g. the stationary position of the earth is an optical illusion based on over-estimating the accuracy of man's sense data). Consequently, there is a change in the explanation of the 'cause' of the above objective phenomena with the new system.

This kind of illustrates my problem; a paradigm shift is a 'qualitative' change in human knowledge, whereas testing a hypothesis is an 'quantitative' accumulation in human knowledge. The concept of reality (the stationary position of the earth) is confirmed by the evidence until enough evidence is accumulated to get people to stop believing in it.
Falsification is not an objective quality of a hypothesis, but a subjective human 'stress-test' of individual belief. people just stop believing in a theory when the evidence reaches a certain point.

Marxism begins by making certain assumptions about the nature of society, which have logical conclusions; capitalism has internal contradictions, therefore it will end in a communist revolution.

And here we have a falsifiable thesis. Though, that depends on what do we consider "Marxism" (are there Marxisms?).
To reiterate what I wrote above, the assumptions from which Marxism (should) start(s) are real assumptions - living men and their mutual interaction in producing the means of production and subsistence and their social relations with it, as it is.
After the study of this specific society, the conclusion is that capital presents the barrier to capital accumulation - inherently crisis prone etc.

But the important point is that your conclusion, which implies the inevitability of communist revolution, is false and born from the specific teleological interpretation of the materialist conception of history and the analysis of capital. Indeed, there is good reason, common sense that is, to rely on historical experience and cast serious doubt over such idealist optimism.

how do we know that real assumptions are in fact real without taking sides in a paradigm by which to demonstrate it? The current 'scientific' method and dialectics are not compatible with one another and are in conflict over the nature of beliefs about reality as objectivly derived from 'facts' or subjectively derived from a historically conditioned experience.

Is it not possible that materialism is just another form of idealism? Is Marxism/materialism not potentially teleological by beginning with apriori reasoning that the nature of the world is material and motion is dialectical? Materialism may be a philosophy and a product of the mind, rather than one which reflects the nature of reality in the mind. I am still not sure, as I feel that the position in the materialism-idealism conflict is the beginning not the end of human knowledge.

I have doubts as to whether a communist revolution will be successful; there is alot which has to be learned from the mistakes of the past. But I accept the 'inevitability' of communism [in the sense that it is a logical conclusion] based on my acceptance of dialectics and materialism as apriori reasoning which reflect the nature of reality as a result of my own experiences. [in much the same way a person observing natural phenemona may come to the conclusion that some underlying law is at work; whether that law is a 'divine' or 'scientific' one.]

I would not accept however the absolutist proof that it is a 'scientific law' (in the sense which is dogmatically presented today), but rather that the lack of supporting evidence means this may still be a subjective belief as opposed to an objective reality.
(i.e. I'm still at the stage of accepting Marxism as true, but not their yet).

[JimFar2]

Concerning Popper, as I pointed out in another time and place:

One Marxist school that attempted to deal with, if not answer Popper were the Analytical Marxists. It is interesting to note Popper's influence on the Analytical Marxist school, both positively and negatively. G.A. Cohen in his *Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence* makes no mention at all of Popper, and yet his book reads to me as a kind of reply to Popper, since Cohen attempts to reformulate historical materialism (or at least historical materialism as understood by the Second International) as a rigorous empirical theory of history. William Shaw (in *Marx's Theory of History*) and Dan Little (in *The Scientific Marx), on the other hand, do attempt to answer directly Popper's criticisms of Marxism, and they both draw upon Lakatos' critiques of Popper, in doing so. Jon Elster
in *Making Sense of Marx* presented a version of Analytical Marxism that was actually quite Popperian in tone, including an embracing of Popper's methodological individualism and rational choice approach to social science. Curiously enough, Elster makes no mention of Popper, and yet it is hard to imagine that he arrived at his views without
having drawn upon Popper.


In connection with the Analytical Marxian school there is another book that people may wish to look at on this issue, the unjustly neglected book *Analyzing Marx* by Richard W. Miller. In that book he draws a distinction between the technological interpretation of historical materialism which was articulated and defended by many writers of the Second International (i.e. Kautsky, Plekhanov) and which cast into an especially rigorous form by
G.A. Cohen in his *Karl Marx's Theory of History*, and what he calls the mode of production interpretation which abjures the technological determinism and
the economic determinism of the latter.


Miller draws a link between these two different interpretations of historical materialism and different philosophies of science. The technological interpretation, Miller links to positivist philosophies of science with their covering law models of scientific explanation and their presuppostion of Humean notions concerning causality. Here, Miller does not draw a very sharp distinction between positivism and Popperism. While Popper clearly did not see himself as being a positivist, he nevertheless, still had many notions in common with them. In Miller's view Popper's hypothetico-deductivism placed him within the positivist camp. In any case, Miller contends that the technological interpretation of historical materialism does represent the sort of theory that can be regarded as falsifiable from a strictly Popperian standpoint. Hence, it is scientific by Popper's criteria. The only
thing that is wring with it is that history has indeed (as Popper had contended) falsified it, and the other thing that is wrong with it, is that in Miller's view it represents a distorted interpretation of how Marx undertook the study of history and political economy.

The mode of production interpretation in Miller's view offers us a view that is closer to the spirit of Marx's actual methodology. But it is not falsifiable in the strict Popperian sense. One might then think that Miller would propose to throw away falsifiability as a criterion of demarcation between science and non-science but surprisingly enough he does not. Instead, he attempts to reconstruct the notion of falsifiability, drawing upon the work of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. He embraces their historicist approach to the philosophy of science and he develops a reconstructed version of the notion of falsifiability. The mode of production interpretation of historical materialism while perhaps not falsifiable in Popper's sense, is nevertheless falsifaible in Miller's sense and that justifies retaining the label of science for it. Miller also BTW contends that the postivist
(and Popperian) analysis of natural science is fundamentally flawed so that while the
positivists were quite correct in seeking a unified science which would assimilate the social sciences into the natural sciences , they misunderstood the nature of natural science. For Miller, the antipositivists were correct in attacking positvism for trying to force social science into a narrow mold centering around the covering law model and
deductive-nomological models of explanation and Humean causality, but the same flaws also applied to their analysis of natural science. In reality such an analysis, in Miller's view is not properly applicable to either natural science or social science.

[ckaihatsu]

Regardless of any possible ideological motivations, the call for using the 'falsifiability' criterion is simply a non-starter, or 'apples-and-oranges' when applied to Marxism and historical determinism....

This is because 'falsifiability' is being inappropriately applied to a topic of *social science* as though a lab process of *hard science* could be used for it.

Hypothesis: An hypothesis is a conjecture, based on the knowledge obtained while formulating the question, that may explain the observed behavior of a part of our universe. The hypothesis might be very specific, e.g., Einstein's equivalence principle or Francis Crick's "DNA makes RNA makes protein",[20] or it might be broad, e.g., unknown species of life dwell in the unexplored depths of the oceans. A statistical hypothesis is a conjecture about some population. For example, the population might be people with a particular disease. The conjecture might be that a new drug will cure the disease in some of those people. Terms commonly associated with statistical hypotheses are null hypothesis and alternative hypothesis. A null hypothesis is the conjecture that the statistical hypothesis is false, e.g., that the new drug does nothing and that any cures are due to chance effects. Researchers normally want to show that the null hypothesis is false. The alternative hypothesis is the desired outcome, e.g., that the drug does better than chance.

A final point: a scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable, meaning that one can identify a possible outcome of an experiment that conflicts with predictions deduced from the hypothesis; otherwise, it cannot be meaningfully tested.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

*Social science* is better-served with the *inductive reasoning* process, by which a 'critical mass' of supporting data will allow the researcher to arrive at a conclusion / generalization about the data. If some existing data is *outlying* -- adding complexities and complications to the conclusion -- that doesn't necessarily mean that the larger conclusion is *invalidated*, it just means that there are 'shades of gray', or contingencies, bound-up with the abstracted generalization.

*Hard science* is better-served by the *deductive reasoning* process, by which incontrovertible results can be determined from various definitive tests, with *no* shades-of-gray, or nuance, involved.


Order - Complexity - Complication - Chaos

[TaylorS]

A lot of good information in this thread, thanks!

I just remembered that Popper an active Marxist in his late teens and early 20s. I wonder how much his perception of Marxism was colored by interacting with "vulgar Marxists" who treated Marxism like a religious dogma, as well as the spineless double-think of the social-democratic parties in Germany and Austria in 1918?

[blake 3:17]

I've read some Popper and was very impressed. I see Marxism as an art, not a science.

[blake 3:17]

Won't go on to long, since I'm too ignorant, but I think Marx was right on a lot, and Marxism is right on a number of specific issues.

I guess I consider myself a half Marxist -- seeing the decommodification of labour as central to the struggle for socialism -- but consider myself more and more just a Socialist, Communist, or Anarchist.

[Thirsty Crow]

I just remembered that Popper an active Marxist in his late teens and early 20s. I wonder how much his perception of Marxism was colored by interacting with "vulgar Marxists" who treated Marxism like a religious dogma, as well as the spineless double-think of the social-democratic parties in Germany and Austria in 1918?

I don't think that this case can be made.

As far as I know, and you'll have to take my word for it since I don't recall the source in which I read this, he read some Marx, Engels, and excerpts from Lenin and Stalin.
And he dabbled in communist practice and theory for a whole 3-4 months. Precious experience and learning time, isn't it?

What is more important is his first hand account of the violence (and I think, murder of) against communist militants in Vienna in 1919, which had a decisive impact.

And just to briefly comment on one of the points raised by Red Economist (will try to cover the whole post at a later date):

how do we know that real assumptions are in fact real without taking sides in a paradigm by which to demonstrate it?

I'm basing my position on Marx's observation about the real starting point of investigation - which can be demonstrated very easily, and empirically. If we claim that, due to for instance the prediction of the polarization of society into two classes, we demonstrate the correctness of this by reference to demographics through the lens of statistics, with obviously an explanation of categories used.

And if you here refer to the question of observable reality being real, I'd say that this is a non-problem, a pseudo-problem arising from the vagaries of traditional philosophy. Practical life and knowledge of this life and nature necessitates that we discard such eminently impractical and foolish questions.

The current 'scientific' method and dialectics are not compatible with one another and are in conflict over the nature of beliefs about reality as objectivly derived from 'facts' or subjectively derived from a historically conditioned experience.

When I talk about the scientific method I merely talk about its most general prerequisite - propositions need to be checked against the way that the world is like.

All this talk about objective derivation and subjective derivation seem to me pretty meaningless.

Of course, historically conditioned experience is a way to describe society, but it is foolish to consider opinions about this society as only a matter of (class) perspective - the relationship between people can be studied apart from what they think about them, and even then you can study this in conjunction with what people think about their life without falling into the trap of idealism.

As for dialectics:

Is it not possible that materialism is just another form of idealism? Is Marxism/materialism not potentially teleological by beginning with apriori reasoning that the nature of the world is material and motion is dialectical?

Sure, though then your practice of Marxism would be very different from mine.

This (my position) is mostly based on the mystifications of the so called dialctics, which I accept only if its based on a modest, and correct, claim that certain relationships are two-way - an element acting on another element, which then as a consequence acts on the former, and so on. Apart from this, notions such as universal interconnection (and motion being "dialectical", whatever that could mean) belong to the dustbin of traditional philosophy.

*Social science* is better-served with the *inductive reasoning* process, by which a 'critical mass' of supporting data will allow the researcher to arrive at a conclusion / generalization about the data.

To sort of play the devil's advocate here, how could you operationalize the notion of "critical mass" in relation to supporting data?

[baronci]

I've read some Popper and was very impressed. I see Marxism as an art, not a science.

How is marxism an art?

[Thirsty Crow]

How is marxism an art?

Telling stories as obtaining knowledge...of sorts.

Really, this defeatism is riduculous. One guy comes up with a philosophy of science, which is deliberately built to exclude Marxism and is in fact inconsistent* and poof, we're novelists.

*Here I refer to the final word of Mr. Popper on Marxism, which was forced by his own student's criticisms (Imre Lakatos), which can be summed up as that ad hoc justifications, supposedly of a singular nature - to deliberately make the theory unfalsifiable - of theoretical mispredictions actually make it a pseudoscience. One would have to wonder whether Popper produces any actual evidence for this claim. If not, or if the evidence is patchy, biased, one cannot help but wonder whether this specific falsificationism is much more than a strategy against the burden of proof requirement for rabid anti-communists.

And not only this. One should take a look at the proposed scientific theory of society that the man advances - and the mess he gets himself into by proposing a general law which he claims is both unfalsifiable and false, at the same time. Sure, all the staggering evidence and logic against Marxism is piling up!

[argeiphontes]

I think apples and oranges is right, LinksRadikal, for reasons along the same lines as yours. I'm not intimately familiar with Popper's argument but I would put forward this tentative criticism:

For whatever reason, perhaps philosophical, Popper is afraid of a Marxism of science. He suspects it's true that if a science of Marxism is possible, then so is a Marxism of science. To avoid this trap, he has to deny that Marxism is a science and at the same time elevate science into a discourse about the validity of Marxism, giving rise to the demand that historical materialism be falsifiable on empirical grounds.

But this is just a trick, since in fact science and historical materialism stand in an egalitarian relationship toward each other. Science is a method; it makes no statement as to the content of disciplines that proceed according to the method. The same, I think, is true of historical materialism; it is a way of knowing and not a known, in the same way that hermeneutics has no particular content to defend.

So, in another thread on Cultural Marxism, we see the method applied to other disciplines such as psychology (Fromm) and history (Jameson). Only such particular contents, having been discovered through application of historical materialist method, can be subject to falsification. You can't use reified "science" to judge historical materialism.

That's all I've got, YMMV.

edit to add: So yes, as someone stated, the real question would be whether HM results in knowledge of events, the same way that science "works" by providing knowledge of the physical world.

[Red Economist]

Quote:
The current 'scientific' method and dialectics are not compatible with one another and are in conflict over the nature of beliefs about reality as objectivly derived from 'facts' or subjectively derived from a historically conditioned experience.
When I talk about the scientific method I merely talk about its most general prerequisite - propositions need to be checked against the way that the world is like.

All this talk about objective derivation and subjective derivation seem to me pretty meaningless.

Its down to the demarcation line between science and pseudo-science based on what we believe can be known and what is real. The scientific method is itself the product of a historical change in thought and will continue to be subject to change. It is not the product of an objective reason, but once began as a historically conditioned philosophical belief that propositions needed to be checked against the body of evidence. (when I'm not sure, but Ancient Greece probably if not in it's modern form during the age of reason and the enlightenment).

The problem with the boundary between objectivity and subjectivity is a problem of drawing a line between science and philosophy when the two are interdependent on the other as the product of human social practice. Marxism begins in the realm of the philosophy of mind (courtesy of Feurbach whose challenge against religion was that it was a projection of man's alienated qualities). Marx turns idealist philosophy (mind>matter) on it's head to get materialism (matter>mind). In doing so, Marx redefined the boundary of objective reality so that the mind became determined by material/socioeconomic conditions, where as before it had a 'free' existence which was not determined by material environment.
He shifted the boundary of Science further into what would traditionally have been the realm of philosophers and deduced that human social interactions determined social consciousness. In doing so he increased the horizon of man's potential knowledge of nature and society.

Popper's idea of making a hypothesis falsifiable was a very conservative (and arguably a destructive and reactionary) point of view. An attempt to increase the scope of the scientific reasoning in the sense Marx did, redefines reality by arguing that instead of consciousness being the product of the mind, it is in fact determined by the material conditions of society. This increases the scope of what can be known about society. In the process, the boundary between objectivity and subjectivity, between what we believe can be known and what kind of reality is perceived is redrawn.

[ckaihatsu]

*Social science* is better-served with the *inductive reasoning* process, by which a 'critical mass' of supporting data will allow the researcher to arrive at a conclusion / generalization about the data.

To sort of play the devil's advocate here, how could you operationalize the notion of "critical mass" in relation to supporting data?

Hmmmm, not quite sure what you mean by 'operationalize [...] critical mass' -- it would depend-on and vary case-by-case, of course.

To use an everyday example, consider a person's wardrobe -- at what point would you call it 'theirs' -- ? When the person is a child such decisions over clothing are entirely in the hands of whoever's raising them, with increasing input (likely) from the person themselves as they grow up and assert their own individuality over the matter. And, perhaps, even with a fully 'autonomous' wardrobe, a person might still include articles of clothing that are gifts from others, and so not entirely of one's own choosing. Would one 'gift' in a collection invalidate the *entire* collection as being 'theirs' alone -- ? How many, or what percentage, of gifts in a collection *would* be the 'critical mass' that indicates a loss of controllership over one's own wardrobe -- ?