not word meanings. Isaiah Berlin said (rightly) that Popper produced one of the most devastating refutations of Marxism. Popper said that this is a world where we see the give and take of debate as highly esteemed because we are all infinitely ignorant, and only differ in the little bits of knowledge that we have, so we can only get nearer to the truth with some co-operative effort.History can not be studied in the same way as Popper’s idea of science. Theories of what took place can be made, but they cannot be eliminated through experimentation, and we are more likely to have a larger number of theories left over within history than within science.The Marxist view of history is that the course of time follows certain rules, much like the laws that can be found in sciences such as physics. The main rule in Marxism is that the upper class will always oppress and make use of the lower classes to such an extent that the lower classes will rise up against the aristocratic classes and create a new class system where they are in the upper classes. However, this will lead them to prey on those that are less fortunate than them, or those slightly different to them. The new lower classes will then rise up and a new order is created where there are no classes. This is all supposed to happen over the course of hundreds of years. However the whole system took place in Russia in their revolution in a very short period of time. This apparently proved the Marxist view of history to be wrong. However the only thing in the theory which was seen to be wrong was the time span, but in science the amount of time a chemical reaction, for example, takes for completion is never the same each time the experiment is conducted. Historic theories on the other hand always involve an average period of time. But what Marxism didn’t take into account was any other factors. Whether the lower classes would rebel or not depends on the amount of ...
