Karl Popper dedicated his life to dressing up very commonplace arguments against socialism with philosophical and political critiques.
The most famous one was to claim that Marxism is not scientific, since it does not satisfy his ‘falsifiability criterion’. Marx’s insights, therefore, did not make any serious advance from the utopian socialists that preceded him.
The second was Popper’s attack on ‘historicism’, whereby he argues that we cannot understand or predict historical development, as human history is unique and discreet. The kind of predictability pursued by Marxists is impossible, as history exhibits no important regularities.
In this episode of Marxist Voice, Khaled Malachi defends the scientific status of Marxism, and reveals the faults in Popper’s one-sided approach to both science and history.
