Assessing Popper's critique of Marx's historicism as well as limited Essay - 1

Assessing Popper's critique of Marx's historicism as well as limited defense of one or more of one or more of Marx's doctrines - Essay Example According to Popper, the main Marxist doctrines that contributed to the failure by the Australian social democrats to prevent the rise of fascism and the eventual collapse of parliamentary democracy is the Marxist historical doctrine of pseudo-scientific historical materialism. Popper was particularly traumatized by the failure of the democratic parties in Austria to prevent the takeover of Austrian politics by fascism between the 1920s and the 1930s. Popper argued that the communist economic system, which were manifested through fatal ambiguity, passivity and vanguardist politics, and social engineering contributed to the collapse of the parliamentary democracy. In addition, Popper attributed economic historicism and communism to the decline of the Austrian social democracy and the rise of fascism. For example, according to Popper, economic historicism based on Marxist doctrines encouraged the skeptism of the socialist on their ability to reverse historical trends and this significantly weakened their resolve to fight fascism (Hacohen 328). Finally Popper suggested that Marxism led to Austrian social democracy into a dead end by creating real problems that tended to displace another. The social democracy, which Marx promoted, failed to demonstrate feasible economic alternative that reflected market capitalism and totalitarian command economy according to Karl Popper (. The Marx’s ideologies that were inherent in the Austrian socialism committed the country into grave errors. For example, he suggested that Marxism not only failed to provide the Austrian and German socialists with guidelines of sharing political power with the non-socialists thereby resulting in disastrous consequences to their struggle against fascism (Hacohen 327). According to Popper, some of the defensible Marxist doctrines included Marxists critique of psychologism as well as Marx arguments of the autonomy of sociology and