Falsificationism Overextended: Popper's Category Misidentification of Marx and Its Epistemological Consequences

Popper demarcated science from non-science by the criterion of falsifiability and accordingly judged Marx's historical materialism to be ”pseudoscience.” The force of this verdict has never been fully dissolved in the scholarly responses to it---existing defenses either attempt to prove that Marx's predictions were ”indeed verified” or argue that Marx never intended to make testable scientific predictions, yet neither path questions Popper's self-appointment as the sole legitimate arbiter. This paper argues that Popper's judgment commits a philosophical type misidentification: he mistakes Marx's practical testing for a deficient version of scientific hypothesis testing, failing to see that they are two distinct types of operation. The paper first dissects the three presuppositions underlying Popper's critique and their common root in a non-historical conception of testing, then exposes a self-referential predicament at the logical foundation of falsificationism itself: the falsification of a scientific theory depends on the verification of a proposition Popper himself classifies as ”non-scientific,” and the acceptance of basic statements- --the most elementary operation in the falsificationist system---cannot be justified within its own logical framework but must appeal to a historical ”decision” by the scientific community. The paper then presents, through the concrete example of a carpenter making a chair, the operational structure of Marx's practical testing, and systematically contrasts it with scientific experimentation along three dimensions: the position of the tester, the form of the verdict, and the temporal structure of testing. Two independent lines of evidence---Kuhn's theory of paradigms and the measurement problem in quantum mechanics---further corroborate that the non-historical model of testing fails even within scientific practice itself. The paper's core contribution is neither a defense of Marx nor a refutation of Popper, but the dissolution of a false dichotomy: falsificationism and practical testing are two distinct types of testing, each valid within its own domain. Popper's critique of Marx fails not because Popper is wrong, but because he overextends---and this overextension cannot sustain itself on its own terms.