The Open Society and Its Enemies

Popper moves on from Marx’s methodology to evaluate his historical prophecy (333). Herein lies Popper’s fundamental disagreement with Marx, since he has been critical of using history as destiny throughout this entire book. Marx’s historicism is economic in nature and is used to assess sweeping social changes (343).

Marx sought to achieve two goals when writing Capital. The first goal was to locate those forces that he believed would destroy capitalism in the evolution of the material means of production (345). Marx also believed that these forces leave a significant impact on the relationship between the classes as well as key institutions in society (345). His second goal was to challenge the defenders of capitalism as a system of social relations (346).

Popper provides a detailed breakdown of Marx’s two-part historicist prophecy. First, the growing class consciousness of the working class is to eventually lead to a social revolution as a result of the increase in misery created by the capitalist mode of production. Capitalist production relies on the growth of productivity due to technological innovation and the “increasing accumulation of the means of production” (346). In other words, fewer and fewer people control more and more wealth as well as the means of production. This phenomenon leads to an increase in wealth for the ruling class—an oligarchy (405)—and to an increase in misery for the working class. As suffering increases, those who suffer become more cognizant of their status as a collective, and this awareness increases class consciousness. Eventually, this situation reaches a boiling point, and a social revolution occurs. Second, the result of this revolution is the dictatorship of the proletariat. Later yet, the state withers away, and a classless, socialist society emerges (346-47, 354).

Next, the author analyzes Marx’s theory of growing misery, which means “an increasing exploitation of the employed workers; not only in numbers but also in intensity” (375). Popper describes this concept as erroneous (385). Marx asserted that the trade cycle—built into capitalism—generates progressively worsening depression periods. As depressions become more impactful, so do unemployment and its physical and psychological effects on the working class. The German philosopher perceived unemployment as a crucial instrument of capitalism used to increase exploitation by maintaining low wages. Indeed, long work hours and low wages are directly proportional to increasing misery and inversely proportional to the accumulation of capital in the hands of the ruling class (385-87). Popper underscores the fact that Marx’s chronology is reversed: Low wages, child exploitation, and unsafe working conditions were part of early capitalism rather than its later stages (391). This theory operates on the principle of “the worse—the better” (395), since worsening conditions must lead to a social revolution. However, Popper questions this principle because it would demoralize the working class as a result of the failures of their resistance rather than inspire them to take action (357, 395). In practice, too, moderate Marxists—Social Democrats—rejected this theory upon witnessing the opposite developments take place (393).

Marx and Engels also arrived at a secondary hypothesis for their theory of social revolution pertaining to the European colonies. They suggested that colonial workers were even more disadvantaged than the European proletariat (392). Vladimir Lenin developed this concept by describing Britain as a colonial, capitalist monopoly engaged in the exploitation of the world at large. This strategy allowed Britain to achieve the dominant role in the global markets. Lenin believed that the conditions were ripe for a revolution in Britain’s colonies and only then would they spread to Britain proper. Popper challenges Lenin’s assertions with several examples of colonial powers like Belgium and the Netherlands whose domestic proletariat did not benefit from their respective colonial pursuits (392-93).

After this, Popper examines the Russian Revolution in more detail to disprove Marx’s predictions. First, the Revolution occurred in a largely agrarian—not proletarian—country. Second, Russia undertook rapid industrialization with the First Five-Year Plan in 1928. Yet according to Marx, the proletarian revolution should have been the end result of industrialization, which means that the opposite occurred (353). Also, contrary to Marx’s prediction, Popper argues that successful revolutionary leaders would form a new ruling class (348). The formation of a new elite is precisely what took place in post-revolutionary Russia, in which those of proletarian or peasant origin filled the ranks of the new bureaucracy loyal to the state (Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1983, 2008, pp. 84, 160). Furthermore, this new post-revolutionary state owned the means of production. However, it grew stronger and exerted greater control instead of withering away as Marx prophesized (350). The author also compares the developments in the West in the realm of labor rights, which did not experience a violent revolution because labor conditions improved, including a shorter work week and unemployment insurance (350).

Popper is also interested in the question of violence as part of this predicted social revolution (360). The author calls Marx’s vagueness on this subject the “ambiguity of power conquest” (365). However, Marx’s followers, the moderate Social Democrats and the radical Communists, held different views on violence (360). Whereas all Marxists would find violence permissible to bring down a tyrannical government, only the radical wing would support a violent revolution. For instance, the 1928 Communist International discussed “the violent overthrow of bourgeois power” as well as “a direct attack upon the bourgeois state” (366). Moderates, in contrast, would prefer a gradual, non-violent transition under specific conditions within the context of capitalism (361-64). Next, Popper highlights the dire political repercussions of the aforementioned Marxist ambiguity. He believes that this lack of clarity emboldened fascists because radical Marxists viewed their power as the necessary historic step on the way to a proletarian revolution (370-72). Indeed, Popper considers democracy a superior form of majority rule because it allows for reforms without resorting to political violence (368). The author himself only justifies violence as a defensive instrument to protect democracy (360).

Herein lies another inconsistency in Marx’s prediction. The possibility of a peaceful transition for moderate Marxists undermines Marx’s call in Capital, “The expropriators are expropriated” (362), because capitalism cannot be ameliorated. Even the events Marx witnessed in his own lifetime, such as the attempts to improve the proletariat’s working conditions, undermined his prediction of increasing misery (363-64). Popper stresses the need for state interventionism in the market through democratic institutions to continue improving labor conditions as the solution to the excesses of capitalism (387, 391). Taxation and anti-trust laws should be used to challenge monopolization—or what Marx accurately described as the gradual accumulation of wealth in fewer hands (376).

One of the central aspects of Marxist theory is the labor theory of value and the related theory of surplus value. The labor theory of value describes the relationship between the amount of labor that goes into manufacturing a product expressed by the number of hours required for production and paying for this work (376-77). Popper locates Platonic influence in Marx’s concept of prices seen as appearances and that there is something real behind them (383). The theory of surplus value tackles the issue of profit and whether the factory owner—the capitalist—profits by underpaying his workers. In other words, the capitalist makes profits because it is he who monopolized the means of production (377-78). Marx also uses the concept of labor power—“worker’s whole labor power is equal to the labour hours needed for producing the means of his subsistence” (379). According to Marx, a higher hourly production rate translates into fewer hours needed to complete a project. Therefore, the capitalist system exploits labor and exploits high productivity (380). However, Marx also acknowledged that gradually increasing productivity is beneficial because it makes more useful commodities available to society, as economic relations transitioned from more predatory forms, such as slavery, to less predatory counterparts (388). The author qualifies this central aspect of Marxism as unnecessary and unimportant (376). After all, prices change as a consequence of supply and demand, which is sufficient to explain Marx’s concept of worker exploitation under capitalism regardless of its validity (381-82).

Ultimately, Popper locates the failure of Marx’s predictions in the poverty of historicism per se (396). Indeed, Popper felt so strongly about this subject that he dedicated an entire work, The Poverty of Historicism (1957), to it. That text examines similar themes to The Open Society, specifically the connection between 20th-century totalitarian ideologies, their belief in historic destiny, and the so-called laws of history. Popper also suggests that the “prophetic elements” in Marx halted the struggle for an open society.

Indeed, where Marx’s historicism failed, his institutional analysis succeeded, specifically that of the excesses of 19th-century capitalism through the lens of sociology and economics (396, 400-01). The author also argues that the trade cycle aspect of Marx’s prophesizing, such as the issue of growing productivity, actually came to pass (400). The latter saw the trade cycle as a highly destructive aspect of the credit system—one that was to lead to its collapse (398, 400). Popper qualifies the gradual, ongoing increase in productivity as well as the accumulation of the means of production as the consequences of civilizational progress (398).