The Scientificalization and Vulgarization of Marxism in the 20th Century: A Critical Analysis on K. Popper’s Critique of Marxism

doi:10.4236/ojpp.2013.34069

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Open Journal of Philosophy

2013. Vol.3, No.4, 475-478

Published Online November 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojpp) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojpp.2013.34069

Open Access 475

The Scientificalization and Vulgarization of Marxism in the 20th

Century: A Critical Analysis on K. Popper’s Critique of Marxism

Fan Chang

School of Marxism, Institution of Western Marxist Philosophy,

China Three Gorges University, Yichang, China

Email: [email protected]

Received August 31st, 2013; revised September 30th, 2013; accepted October 7th, 2013

tion License, which permits unrestricted use, distri bution, and reproduc ti on in any medium, provided the original

work is properly cited.

Marxism was indeed vulgarized due to scientism in the 20th century, which even limits the development

of Chinese social theories nowadays. This paper put forward the idea that it was serious misunderstanding

to interpret Marx as prophet or inventor like empiricists who regard finding out eternal laws as the goal of

science. In fact, Marx did not propose any so-called “natural laws of historical development”. He articu-

lated that the only thing worth to do was to take note of what happened before his eyes and to become its

mouthpiece. Thus, to understand science in the face of social practice, to analyze everything historically

and never to thrust “eternal” laws in any era should be taken as the core of Marx’s new science, which is

very important to China today.

Keywords: Kant; Hegel; Marx; Popper; Marxism; Science; Vulgarization

Introduction

Vulgarization of science has been very serious since Marx’s

time. The focus of Marx’s critique of bourgeois economics was,

in fact, to critic its vulgarization—vulgar empiricism, positiv-

ism and materiali sm. For a long time, however, Marx’s concep -

tion of science has not been understood well, so Marx theory

was vulgarized again. Faced with the French Marxists of 1870s,

Marx said: “All I know is that I am not a Marxist.” (Marx/

Engels, 2001: p. 7). In the afterword to the second German edi-

tion of Das Kapital in 1872, Marx complained openly that the

method employed in Das Kapital “has been little understood”

(Karl Marx, 1982: p. 17). In Critique of Gotha Program in

1875, Marx even used words such as “nonsense”. After Marx

died, the problem was more serious that Lenin said: “Half a

century later, none of the Marxists understood Marx!!” (Lenin,

1976: p. 180) But Lenin also did not prevent this trend; ulti-

mately, much-criticized Stalinism happened.

In the 20th century, Marxism was vulgarized indeed. Karl.

Popper, one of the most influential philosophers of science in

the twentieth century, pointed that the men who vulgarized

Marxism were Marxists after Marx. It was the followers of

Marx that turned the original empirical scientific theory of

Marx into non-testable and irrefutable one. Popper lived in the

era of Cold War, and his theory aimed to oppose Soviet Marx-

ism or Stalinism. Putting aside political ideology reasons, how-

ever, we found that Popper also misunderstood Marx’s scien-

tific method, which led to a new round process of vulgariza-

tion of Marxism. This paper will explore this difficult prob-

lem in the history of Western science and philosophy to pro-

pose some helpful suggestions for the development of China

today.

Empirical Science and the Vulgarization of

Marxism

In 1919, the Austrian social revolution was underway, there

were at great length all about the evidences of Marxist theory

on newspapers. But Einstein’s relativity hadn’t so much evi-

dences, as long as there was a solar eclipse observation prove

that its description didn’t exist (at that time, the observation of

the solar eclipse confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity just),

the theory would be denied. Popper was greatly impressed by

the huge theoretical risks of relativity. He began to believe that

“can be verified” could not be regarded as the criterion of sci-

ence, instead, “The criterion of the scientific status of a theory

is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.” (Popper, 1963:

p. 37) And then Popper began to suspect that Marxism was

simply false. Popper claimed that some of Marxists’ early for-

mulations (for example, Marx’s analysis of the character of the

“coming social revolution”) were testable, and in fact had been

falsified (even so, they were scientific). Yet instead of accept-

ing the refutations, the followers of Marx re-interpreted both

the theory and the evidence in order to make them be agreed. In

this way, they rescued the theory from refutation but at the

price of adopting a device which was made irrefutable. As a

result, the followers of Marx destroyed much advertised claim

to scientific status of Marxism (Popper, 1963: p. 37).

Evidently, Popper mainly blamed the followers of Marx (it

should be stressed), and what Popper blamed the followers of

Marx was that they transformed Marxism theory which was an

original theory of empirical science into non-testable and ir-

refutable one. It was very clear that the aim of Popper was to

criticize the Orthodox Marxism (namely, Scientific Marxism),

which has been degenerated into dogmatism. At that time, both

F. CHANG

Soviet Marxism and the Second International Marxism re-

garded themselves as Scientific Marxism, articulated to be

proven in the strict sense of science, in fact, they had serious

dogmatic tendencies. At the moment Popper admitted some

formulations of Marx were empirical science, however, he ac-

tually still vulgarized the scientificity of Marxism theory. What

happened in the case?

Let’s turn to the history of Western science. Francis Bacon

distinguished “natural philosophy” (i.e., “nature science”) from

theology. In Bacon’s human knowledge system, only nature

science should be regarded as the great mother of the science,

other sciences wouldn’t grow if they left this root (Francis Ba-

con, 2000: p. 64). To emphasize the real source of science is

nature, which was to emphasize the objective, and seek the

truth in objective things. One had to put the “real object” at the

centre of discourse, and endeavor to find out the eternal truth

hidden behind the object. In this sense Galileo’s physics serve s

as a paradigm shift in the history of the science. His telescope

showed that it was not belief, but observation, induction and

experiment that stood at the horizon of human knowledge. Ac-

cording to classical empiricism, we could get a universal and

objective statement from a finite number of observation state-

ments. The trend could no longer be reversed since Galileo.

When the history of science reached Hume, however, the

“pure” objectivity of science was questioned. Fundamentally,

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is mainly to answer the ques-

tion asked by Hume, namely, how can empirical knowledge be

objective and effective?

After Hume, it was impossible to reach objective injures di-

rectly through observation, so Kant turned to think objective

validity did not result from immediate sense-perception, but

“judgments of perception” (also called “concepts originally

begotten in the understanding”), because “concepts” have their

origin quite a priori in the pure understanding and necessary

universality. In Kant’s texts, necessary universality is objective

validity, they are equivalent terms (Kant, 1949: pp. 54-56). In

this way, Kant argued that he solved the problem on why pure

nature science had objective validity and thus opened a new

channel for empirical science.

Yet Hegel didn’t think so. Hegel thought that the most im-

portant defect of Kant’s epistemology was lack of “movement”.

In Hegel’s analysis, there was no always object, nor eternal

subject. The process of cognition was “the transforming of that

in-itself into that which is for itself, of Substance into Subject,

of the object of consciousness into an object of self-conscious-

ness, i.e. into an object that is just as much superseded, or into

the Notion.” “The movement is the circle that returns into itself,

the circle that presupposes its beginning and reaches it only at

the end.” (Hegel, 1977: p. 488) Thus, Hegel supplemented

Kant’s scientific epistemology: scientific cognition should not

be limited to static analysis of object; instead, the transforma-

tion between object and subject should be realized. By empha-

sizing the transforming between object and subject, Hegel’s

concept of science had the exceptional historical sense, which

was the point that Hegel really beyond Kant. As well known,

Hegel went too far when he emphasized dialectic identity be-

tween object and subject, his science was absolute. As a result,

Hegel developed a speculative idealism. As a kind of reaction-

ary of Hegel’s philosophy, Feuerbach still went too far on the

other hand so that he turned back to the old materialism in

which “the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the

form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous

human activity, practice, not subjectively” (Marx/ Engels, 1975:

p. 3).

It was here that Marx entered the scene of scientific dis-

course. Marx said: “Feuerbach speaks in particular of the per-

ception of natural science; he mentions secrets which are dis-

closed only to the eye of the physicist and chemist; but where

would natural science be without industry and commerce?”

(Marx/Engels, 1970: p. 36) Instead, as long as subjectivity was

put into scientific cognition process, the opposition of man and

nature, as well as social science and natural science, disap-

peared. In another word, the humanity of “pure” natural science

was revealed. Science was no longer just objective and techni-

cal epistemology, and no longer tried to find eternal essence

hidden in objects (in Marx’s late writings, all of these words,

such as “truth”, “essence” and “eternal”, vanished), but “inter-

vened in and transformed human life all the more practically

through industry and has prepared the conditions for human

emancipation” (Karl Marx, 1975: p. 355). In Marx’s analysis,

the question of Being (Sein) was replaced by the idea of Be-

coming (Werden), “natural laws” also became “historical”.

Because of this reason, what we caught in the landscape of

Marx was the incorporation of the “science of humanity” into

the natural sciences. This is a new science, “the science of his-

tory” (Marx/Engels, 1975: p. 27).

According to this point, not only did Marx go beyond em-

piricism, positivism and materialism, in which objective valid-

ity was adored to the point of idolatry, but also beyond the me-

chanical antithesis of subjectiveness and objectivism, spiritual-

ism and materialism, activity and passivity. At that time, Kant,

Hegel, Feuerbach, natural scientists and utopian socialists did

not have a good understanding of science in this complex and

covert forms.

From the perspective of the history of modern Western sci-

ence, Marx’s theory was empirical science certainly, but was

far from the scope of traditional concept of empirical science.

Although Popper read some works of Marx, still did not under-

stand the process of science from Kant to Marx profoundly.

Based on the criterion of “falsifiability, or refutability, or test-

ability”, Popper claimed that some formulations of Marx were

scientific. However, he actually interpreted Marxism theory

according to empirical science or natural science. Is this not

vulgar?

Historical Prophecy and the Vulgarization of

Marxism

Scientific Marxism claimed that Marxism theory was scien-

tific, because Marxism brought the method of natural science

into social science, found out the “natural law” of human soci-

ety, and predicted the development process of human history

precisely. This view was called Historicism by Popper. In the

eyes of Popper, Historicism was vulgar and wrong.

“Historicism” was a word that Popper singled to refer to the

theory about historical prophecy, which means “the view that

the story of mankind has a plot, and that if we can succeed in

unraveling this plot, we shall hold the key to the future.” (Pop-

per, 1962: p. 338). And Marxis m just was such a theory: “Marx-

ism is a purely historical theory, a theory which aims at pre-

dicting the future course of economic and power-political de-

velopments and especially of revolutions.” (Popper, 1947: pp.

78-79). Popper’s attitude was very clear: historicism has never

been successful in scientific prediction, because “scientific”

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476

F. CHANG

determinism is impossible. According to Popper, “scientific”

determinism is a doctrine that if we were given a sufficiently

precise description of events, together with all the laws of na-

ture, any events could be rationally predicted, with any desired

degree of precision. Popper firmly opposed to scientific deter-

minism. In his opinion, the future predictions of a certain mo-

ment would be possible only in a completely isolated, steady

and periodic system. But it is very rare in nature, and certainly

didn’t exist in the modern society. In natural science, the idea

of a law which determined the direction and the character of

evolution was “a typical nineteenth century mistake, arising out

of the general tendency to ascribe to the ‘Natural Law’ the

functions traditionally ascribed to God”; In social science, “so-

ciety is changing, developing”, and “this development is not, in

the main, repetitive” (Popper, 1962: p. 340). So Scientific Mar-

xism established its historicism on the “scientific” determinism,

which was certainly not scientific.

Besides opposing to Scientific Marxism, Popper also at-

tacked Marx directly. Why attacked Marx, then? It because that

Marx was “a false prophet”, especially, Marx “misled scores of

intelligent people into believing that historical prophecy is the

scientific way of approaching social problems” (Popper, 1947:

p. 78). So here, another vital historical question emerged: was

Marx the historical prophet described by Popper?

Sincerely, historicism was indeed an important tradition of

Western culture. Ancient Greek philosophy, medieval theology,

French positivism, English empiricism, Kant and Hegel, though

these schools were very different, all of them believed: behind

the changing world, there were so-called eternal laws or pri-

mary beings. In any case, the world was determined by these

laws, to discover them and forecast the future of the world was

the primary task of scientific cognitions. According to Russo,

this characteristic of Western culture came from the anxiety of

people to get “safety”. In this sense, Religion assured to people

the “eternal” and thus provided a “decisive” future, which gave

the spiritual comfort to them. Science, like philosophy, also

aimed to find some permanent substratum amid changing phe-

nomena (Russo, 1961: pp. 45-46). However, in fact, precisely

in Marx this tenden c y had b ee n curbed and eve n abandoned .

We have indicated above that Marx found a perspective of

dynamic social practice when he overcame the mechanical

materialism of Feuerbach, and found a “historical” perspective

when he critiqued Hegel’s speculative idealism. Consequently,

Marx suggested a significant meaning when he wrote down

“We know only a single science, the science of history.”

(Marx/Engels, 1975: p. 28). “The science of history” was a

science about movements or changes, namely, both social sci-

ence and natural science should understand the world in the

perspective of changes. How can there be eternal things! As

long as viewing science alongside social practice (the main

characteristics of social practice are subjectivity, activity and

change), meanwhile, understanding science in the point of dia-

lectics (dialectics “regards every historically developed social

form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its

transient nature not less than its momentary existence.” (Karl

Marx, 1982: p. 20). Marx’s understanding of science should not

be regarded as determinism, and historical prophecy certainly

should not be treated as Marx’s scientific method and goal.

Actually, Marx valued the general laws of human history

only within certain limits. General laws were not Marx’s scien-

tific goals. For example, at the beginning of political economy

research, Marx pointed that the modern science apart from the

changing social practice, but seeking of the general laws. Marx

said: “What indeed should we think of a science which primly

abstracts from this large area of human labor, and fails to sense

its own inadequacy, even though such an extended wealth of

human activity says nothing more to it perhaps than what can

be said in one word—‘need’, ‘common need’?” (Karl Marx,

1975: p. 354) In Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848),

Marx and Engels blamed the founders of critical-utopian so-

cialism and communism who only knew to search “new social

laws”, but ignored historical conditions of the emancipation of

the proletariat. In Introduction to a Contribution to a Critique

of Political Economy (1857-1858), Marx stressed that when we

talked about the production, we referred to production at a cer-

tain stage of social development, there was no so-called abso-

lute law of “ production in general”. Even if we speak of “gen-

eral laws” on the common sense, this “general” concept itself

were multifarious compound comprising divergent categories.

Some elements were found in all epochs, some were common

to a few epochs. The purpose emphasized these “general laws”

only to avoid repetition, thus the most important thing for us to

do was not to highlight the common, but to emphasize the es-

sential differences. However, modern economists did not per-

ceive this fact, all wisdom of them were used to prove the eter-

nity of the laws of existing social relations. After the publica-

tion of Das Kapital, Marx’s scientific method was misunder-

stood and critiqued. In 1872, Marx endorsed the view attributed

to him in afterword to the second German edition of Das

Kapital that: “But it will be said, the general laws of economic

life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to

the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to

him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his

opinion every historical period has laws of its own…” (Karl

Marx, 1982: p. 18). In 1877, when someone wanted to change

Marx’s theory about the history of western European capitalist

development thoroughly into a general theory of historical phi-

losophy, Marx said: “He is both honoring and shaming me too

much… events strikingly analogous but taking place in differ-

ent historic surroundings led to totally different results. By

studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then

comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenome-

non, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of

a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of

which consists in being super-historical.” (Marx/Engels, 1968:

p. 111). By the word of “super-historical”, Marx distinguished

his scientific theory from all categories of knowledge which

regarded seeking eternal laws and general truth as their essen-

tial mission (Chang, 2012).

Engels also has elaborated this view clearly. Soon after the

publication of Das Kapital, Engels pointed out that, whatever

the fate of the propositions of this book, a lasting merit of Marx

is to have put an end to the narrow-minded concept which

treated political economy “as abstract and universally valid a

science as mathematics”. Due to Marx’s historical outlook, it is

impossible to view social laws as “eternally valid truths”

(Marx/Engels, 1985: p. 218). In the difficult exploration about

the scientificity of Marxism theory, Louis Althusser also found

that when Marx said in a sarcastic tone that he was not a Marx-

ist, Marx actually opposed to describe his works as the general

philosophy of history or the political economy finding total law

of human society by a “writer”. And actually, Marx claimed

that Das Kapital was not a “science” (Althusser, 2003: p. 251).

Professor He Ping, a Chinese scholar, put forward this point in

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F. CHANG

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478

her research, too. She said that there was indeterminism thought

definitely in Marx’s early research on political economy and

late research on anthropology (Ping, 2008). Even Popper him-

self had to recognize that “Karl Marx himself was one of the

first to emphasize the importance, for the social sciences, of

these unintended consequences” (Popper, 1962: p. 342). How

can Marx’s theory be understood as scientific determinism like

Newtonian physics? How can Marx be read as social prophet

pursuing the general law of history?

“Scientific Marxism” interpreted Marxism theory as histori-

cal determinism, consequently, over highlighted the signifi-

cance of general historical law. So it was impossible to avoid

dogma and vulgarization. Ultimately, they misunderstood sci-

ence and put Marxism into this erroneous scientific under-

standing, so left away from the essential spirits of Marx thought

farther and farther. Popper put forward that the goal of modern

science was not prophecy and he was right. Any scientific theo-

ries would make some judgment about the expected develop-

ment in the field more or less. Marxist Theory was no exception.

However, if science leads to some conclusions about prophecy,

it must be a byproduct of science, which could not be regarded

as the standards of science. Popper labeled Marx as historical

determinism without exploring Marx’s science profoundly. A

new round of misunderstanding and vulgarization of Marxism

inevitably occurred.

Conclusion

Our research indicates that there is a close relation between

Marxism’s vulgarization and scientific process in 20th century.

In Das Kapital, Marx once satirized Proudhon socialists be-

cause of their misusing of the word “science”: “where thoughts

are absent, words are brought in as convenient replacements.”

(Marx/Engels, 1989: p. 98) But what a pity, soon after Das

Kapital publication, Marx’s theory also fell into this prevalent

doctrine. This situation existed and developed in the whole 20th

century. Even today, 140 years later, the situation has not fun-

damentally changed. Not only has his scientific method still

“been little understood”, but also some of his conceptions faced

to explicit denials. So did Popper. For this reason, Marxism

theory faced various misunderstandings and plights in its his-

tory. Were Marx alive now, how would he think?

In fact, Marx was a scientific realist who rejected the con-

ception of empiricist analysis of science. Not only was Marx

not a “founder”—a “scientist” like Newton or Darwin, or a

“writer” who tried to establish knowledge system—all bour-

geois economists critiqued by Marx did so, but also he was not

a “historical prophecy”—to find out so-called “natural laws of

historical development” has never been Marx’s ends. What

Marx did merely was to take note of what happened before his

eyes and to become its mouthpiece. The whole Das Kapital was

just a logic expression of social reality. In a word, to understand

science in the face of social practice, analyze everything his-

torically, and never thrust “eternal” laws into every era should

be taken as the core of Marx’s new science. In this sense, the

first thing Marxists should do was to understand reality, not to

tell stories of the future or extract some abstract laws from his-

tory to define any of the actual historical stages. The future

developed and grew up from the current situation; at the same

time, history was helpful only in the sense that history could

lead us to understand today well. Evidently, it was crucial for

China to understand Marxism from the perspective of these,

especially at the moment when China decides to enhance the

confidence of socialism with Chinese characteristics, establish

the Chinese model and solve Chinese increasing practical

problems nowadays.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants from the scientific re-

search project of China Three Gorges University (Code:

KJ2011B064). I would like to thank Ms Zhang Yanli, who is a

librarian of China Three Gorges University, for her fruitful help

in English revise.

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