What the diamat and historical materialism offer is a new branch of science and epistemology with which to experiment.

A technicality here: both Hegelian dialectics and Marxist dialectics are a fair bit older than Popper’s Critical Rationalism. He actually formulated his theory of Falsifiability as a counter to Marxism after learning about Diamat firsthand from Marxists.

Going on a tangent because I got carried away researching this comment (it’s not you, it’s me. I agree with you, just being a nerd)…

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/bppmpw/comment/enwrbco/

Methods, like Popper’s, that came from the positivists have some utility. Their probabilistic research methods are quite useful in ‘hard science’ experimentation (though this seems to just translate to “sciences that make sense to critical rationalists”). But they’re not as useful when generalized to theory and complex systems, and scientists break from critical rationalism all the time to argue this or that theory is more likely to be true. Popper famously disagreed with General Relativity and has since been shown to be incorrect in his skepticism, using his own methods of empricism.

Some marxists think falsifiability is so pushed upon science students because of its propaganda value. A great example of how falsifiability works in favor of the bourgeoise is in the psychological concept of ‘controlling for socioeconomic factors’ which is science-speak for “we don’t want to address class in this experiment”.

That’s not to say that there aren’t social scientists out there studying the intersectionality between class, race, sex, and other psychological factors. But oftentimes, controlling for SES can be used as a smokescreen to individualize mental disorders and their treatment methods. Many social scientists don’t want to get entangled in the idea of taking on an entire class structure to treat illness (either out of ignorance or politics). Therefore, we don’t get treatment methods which involve funneling public funds to community outreach or mutual aid or actually allievating stressors and alienation caused by capitalism.

The result is clear in that most people use psychologists as “legal drug dealers” as that is about as far as you can go with psychology limited by Popperian science. In this case, dialectics gets the goods.

Given that positivism descends from Kant, we can see similarities here to Marxist criticisms of ideological Kantianism:

The state of affairs in Germany at the end of the last century is fully reflected in Kant’s Critik der Practischen Vernunft. While the French bourgeoisie, by means of the most colossal revolution that history has ever known, was achieving domination and conquering the Continent of Europe, while the already politically emancipated English bourgeoisie was revolutionising industry and subjugating India politically, and all the rest of the world commercially, the impotent German burghers did not get any further than “good will”. Kant was satisfied with “good will” alone, even if it remained entirely without result, and he transferred the realisation of this good will, the harmony between it and the needs and impulses of individuals, to the world beyond. Kant’s good will fully corresponds to the impotence, depression and wretchedness of the German burghers, whose petty interests were never capable of developing into the common, national interests of a class and who were, therefore, constantly exploited by the bourgeois of all other nations. These petty, local interests had as their counterpart, on the one hand, the truly local and provincial narrow-mindedness of the German burghers and, on the other hand, their cosmopolitan swollen-headedness. In general, from the time of the Reformation German development has borne a completely petty-bourgeois character.

• Marx & Engels: The German Ideology

It is an essential condition of capitalism that the technology of production be founded upon knowledge of nature from sources other than manual labour. And how a knowledge thus defined and yet reliable, exact and objectively valid is constituted and indeed possible, is a question which must be answered, especially if we do not share the idealistic belief in the original theoretical capacities of a ‘pure intellect’.

The epistemological interest in science is clearly specified historically and economically by its tie-up with the capitalist mode of production. It is not Kant’s ahistorical concern with the possibility of knowledge and of experience in general and as such. Still, even taking leave from Kant’s philosophical apriorism, the questions he asks — how are pure mathematics and pure science possible? — look confusingly like the ones of concern to us. The reason for the similarity lies in the emphatically ahistorical or rather timeless, universal character of mathematics and science and indeed of all intellectual labour divided from manual labour. While Kant’s answer is in line with this character and, correspondingly, implies the perpetual necessity of the division of head and hand and, hence, the impossibility forever of social classlessness, the answer that we require must, on the contrary, be in historical and materialistic terms.

• Alfred Sohn-Rethel: Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology

Sounds right to me, Samubai.