Mailbag: Is Marxism unfalsifiable?
Some simple responses to one of the more elaborate critiques of Marx.
From the mailbag:
Hey Carl,
Have you seen the big thread in r/Marxism about people who say that Marxism is unfalsifiable? I don’t know if you are on Reddit but I’m curious what you think!
I do not spend very much time on Reddit, but I have encountered this line of criticism before. Looking at the thread, however, I am not very impressed by the replies, many of which traffic in postmodern critiques of science that are directly at odds with Marxist thought. Marx, after all, was first and foremost a scientist; he took epistemelogical questions about proof and methodological questions about hypothesis formulation quite seriously. In that light, I will do the same.
When someone tells me that Marxism is unfalsifiable, a point I always make right from the outset is that this is a marginal and contrarian view. Even most critics of Marx disagree! After all, the standard objections to Marx are that Marxism has been “disproven by history” and “economics 101.” Maybe the critics are wrong and Marxism is unfalsifiable, but the point is that this is not a common view. So don’t let folks making the unfalsifiability arg pretend that they are just repeating conventional wisdom.
A second point worth making is that if Marxism is completely unfalsifable then a whole lot of mainstream economics is too. This is because Marx did not reject the classical economic tradition wholesale; he simply developed it further, rejecting some claims or bring others to different conclusions. Both, for example, reject old mercantilist theories of profit and say that it profit emerges from the production process instead. Both agree that market competition tends to drive wages down. In that light, it isn’t enough for liberals to just dismiss Marxist theory wholesale as if his entire analysis is just patent gibberish. One needs to either identity specific claims Marx made that are unfalsifiable (something many critics will not be able to do) or concede that a lot of contemporary economics is unfalsifiable too.
