Introduction

At one point in this interview, we were about halfway through a long working session in Karl Popper’s house at Kenley, a small Surrey town an hour or so from London. As he was again taking me through the core of his critique of Marxism, he stood up from the table and asked me to follow him into the drawing-room-cumlibrary. We went around a grand piano that was completely covered with books, some still open. The bulkiest of them, however, were placed on metal rests. I looked here and there at the books, curious to know what he was then working on (the pre-Socratic philosophers, the autobiography of the Dalai Lama, the Cuban missile crisis). But Popper took me by the arm and led me to the back of the room, near the shelves devoted to Marx which contained many nineteenth-century English and German editions in gold-embossed leather binding. It was the oldest part of the library, at the opposite end from where the 89-year-old philosopher kept copies of his own works in every language. He showed me the volumes of Capital on which he had worked since the age of 17, but that was not the reason why we had left the table. What he pulled out next was a shorter and slimmer volume: the English edition of The Poverty of Philosophy, published in 1913. He flicked through the pages, knowing just what he was looking for, then showed it to me on page 117. ‘Let’s see what it says here.’ He read out one of the last sentences in the book that Marx had published in Paris in 1847, as a polemic against Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty of a year earlier. The theme was the ‘emancipation of the oppressed class’, the proletariat, which ‘implies necessarily the creation of a new society’. For this to happen:

2it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side…. The organization of revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which could be engendered in the bosom of the old society.