Marx on the English Agricultural Revolution: Theory and Evidence

Many people today reject the writings of Marx out of hand, a practice just as unscientific as that of uncritically accepting the validity of his ideas. The acceptance or rejection of a theory, whether it concerns the physical properties of matter or the nature of the capitalist economic system, can only properly be based on whether the facts fit the theory. If a prediction derived from a scientific theory is disconfirmed by the course of events, the theory must be modified or exchanged for another. If, on the other hand, future events correspond to those predicted by the theory, then it can be considered verified -but not, of course, true in an absolute sense, because some future event may disconfirm it.' Using this criterion of verification, one could test the predictions of Marx's theories, made roughly in the middle of the nineteenth century, against subsequent events. That is the course recommended by the philosopher Karl Popper, who himself finds the subsequent events to have been at variance with Marx's predictions.2 Others, however, have argued in good faith that events, indeed, have confirmed the predictions. This discrepancy between groups of neutral observers is easily explained by the vagueness of most of the predictions Marx makes. One perhaps does him an injustice to say that his forecasts are completely without information content. Yet they are so formulated that whatever way any specific event turns out, it can usually be interpreted as being consonant with his predictions.3