From what I can tell, basically every self-conscious liberal, from Karl Popper to Ezra Klein, to the people in my personal life, always say historical-material analysis is overly deterministic. That its focus on class structures is too simplistic, and that “you can’t blame everything on capitalism.”
In my own experience, when I counter those arguments with “okay then, what is your theory of history or human society,” I will hear something that basically boils down to: “ah well it’s just a bunch of people with different ideas acting according to their preferences! It’s much too complex to try to engage with using determinist techniques!” This characterization of human behavior is an abstraction so vague it’s basically useless as a basis for determining action, unless of course it’s through an act of individual choice like voooting.
How convenient. The same old “it’s too complex, don’t bother trying to narrativize it” free-market logic but applied to history and human civilization as a whole. It’s pretty easy to justify the system as it exists if that’s the axiom you start from.
The same old “it’s too complex, don’t bother trying to narrativize it”
Can you imagine if people had this approach to studying the natural world (okay, there are many who of course believe this about science), but if we did, we’d never get the scientific method.
It’s really telling how much of a non-falsifiable orthodoxy liberalism / capitalism / liberal democracy is to these people. A couple centuries of endless bourgeois propaganda really does a number on people’s willingness to even question or understand the political economy.
It’s really telling how much of a non-falsifiable orthodoxy liberalism / capitalism / liberal democracy is to these people
And that’s the really ironic thing! Liberal academics will call Marxism/historical-materialism “unfalsifiable” because we try to apply a class-based lens to understanding events while both modern economics and liberal political theory basically start and stop with the observation that humans are agents optimizing based on a set of preferences. Like okay, sure, humans are optimizing some utility objective, but that doesn’t tell you anything! You could say that about any action ever! Marxism is a structural analysis of why we hold the preferences we do, why we take the actions we do, and how those evolve with economic relations, technology, culture, etc. This is why we go much further than just hand-waving everything as being the result of good/bad people doing good/bad things.
Y’know I quite enjoyed reading Karl Popper. Sure, he thought Marxism was pseudoscience, but he also thought that about climatology (and later recanted). The central Popperian idea that a scientific theory must produce falsifiable predictions is a good one though imo, and can actually be a useful vector of attack against liberal doctrine. They will often fall back on this chaotic, atomized model that you describe because they believe it is ‘truer’ in the sense that it has a higher resolution, but good science isn’t about ‘truth’ — it’s about predictive power, and in practice that means you often have to be ‘reductive’. Put another way, they’re using quantum physics to describe the flight of a football.
I agree, Popper is one of the primary liberals I’ve read whose critiques of the socialist project don’t feel made in bad faith (probably because he was also a socialist when he was younger). I think the critique of falsifiability is an important one for any analytical framework that claims to be scientific. But even then, falsifiability is itself very difficult in a lot of modern scientific fields (social science, biology, economics) where causality is so complex even having truly testable hypotheses gets very difficult.
Like you said though, the test of the liberal analytical framework vs. the Marxist one ultimately comes down to the ability to predict and more importantly act on those predictions. For instance, American liberals don’t seem to understand that the success of their project a la the New Deal was never just “good people” doing “good things,” it was because there were organized, populist masses who could leverage their ability to extract concessions from a willing ruling structure. This blindness is what makes them so ineffective in moments like the one we’re in now.
Also, I think Popper’s theory of the “Paradox of Tolerance” is very useful when it comes to engaging with fascists. It’s a shame modern liberals don’t seem to have the dawg in them to take that seriously anymore.
From what I can tell, basically every self-conscious liberal, from Karl Popper to Ezra Klein, to the people in my personal life, always say historical-material analysis is overly deterministic. That its focus on class structures is too simplistic, and that “you can’t blame everything on capitalism.”
In my own experience, when I counter those arguments with “okay then, what is your theory of history or human society,” I will hear something that basically boils down to: “ah well it’s just a bunch of people with different ideas acting according to their preferences! It’s much too complex to try to engage with using determinist techniques!” This characterization of human behavior is an abstraction so vague it’s basically useless as a basis for determining action, unless of course it’s through an act of individual choice like voooting.
How convenient. The same old “it’s too complex, don’t bother trying to narrativize it” free-market logic but applied to history and human civilization as a whole. It’s pretty easy to justify the system as it exists if that’s the axiom you start from.
Can you imagine if people had this approach to studying the natural world (okay, there are many who of course believe this about science), but if we did, we’d never get the scientific method.
It’s really telling how much of a non-falsifiable orthodoxy liberalism / capitalism / liberal democracy is to these people. A couple centuries of endless bourgeois propaganda really does a number on people’s willingness to even question or understand the political economy.
And that’s the really ironic thing! Liberal academics will call Marxism/historical-materialism “unfalsifiable” because we try to apply a class-based lens to understanding events while both modern economics and liberal political theory basically start and stop with the observation that humans are agents optimizing based on a set of preferences. Like okay, sure, humans are optimizing some utility objective, but that doesn’t tell you anything! You could say that about any action ever! Marxism is a structural analysis of why we hold the preferences we do, why we take the actions we do, and how those evolve with economic relations, technology, culture, etc. This is why we go much further than just hand-waving everything as being the result of good/bad people doing good/bad things.
Y’know I quite enjoyed reading Karl Popper. Sure, he thought Marxism was pseudoscience, but he also thought that about climatology (and later recanted). The central Popperian idea that a scientific theory must produce falsifiable predictions is a good one though imo, and can actually be a useful vector of attack against liberal doctrine. They will often fall back on this chaotic, atomized model that you describe because they believe it is ‘truer’ in the sense that it has a higher resolution, but good science isn’t about ‘truth’ — it’s about predictive power, and in practice that means you often have to be ‘reductive’. Put another way, they’re using quantum physics to describe the flight of a football.
I agree, Popper is one of the primary liberals I’ve read whose critiques of the socialist project don’t feel made in bad faith (probably because he was also a socialist when he was younger). I think the critique of falsifiability is an important one for any analytical framework that claims to be scientific. But even then, falsifiability is itself very difficult in a lot of modern scientific fields (social science, biology, economics) where causality is so complex even having truly testable hypotheses gets very difficult.
Like you said though, the test of the liberal analytical framework vs. the Marxist one ultimately comes down to the ability to predict and more importantly act on those predictions. For instance, American liberals don’t seem to understand that the success of their project a la the New Deal was never just “good people” doing “good things,” it was because there were organized, populist masses who could leverage their ability to extract concessions from a willing ruling structure. This blindness is what makes them so ineffective in moments like the one we’re in now.
Also, I think Popper’s theory of the “Paradox of Tolerance” is very useful when it comes to engaging with fascists. It’s a shame modern liberals don’t seem to have the dawg in them to take that seriously anymore.