I would defend Historical Materialism's claim to "science" but with a requalification of what science actually means (defining it as an ontological system defined by its subject matter rather than a reified method). There is more than a bit of anachronism over the claims by Marx and interpretation of these which date from the 1930s and have come down to us as our common understanding.
Jacoby is right in what he says below and the "commissar" type image, it is exactly the right one as it suggests the officiousness and misplaced extravegence of such claims when they are usually made.
Within the left it is not that there are not examples of precise and clear thinking and good contemporary works, but that the mean of knowledge is still locked in its art deco form. If we are to get anywhere in the comming period this mean level of knowledge has to be lifted significantly and as the organisied Left is the main culprit in keeping the level of debate-in this perpetual pre-adolescense my only conclusion is that it must come from outside the organisied Left and through the means of communications we are now using (however we need to develop this much further technically for it to gain the reach needed).
>From Michael Pugliese quoting "The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and
the Political Freudians" by Russell Jacoby (http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/paper82h.html):
"a Marxist challenge to the consecration of Marxism by science. That Marxism is a science is regularly, almost obsessively, restated in orthodox texts. Here Marxism is infatuated with the bourgeois society it despises. If Marxists wanted to expropriate the expropriators, they also fell in love with their instruments: science and technology. In these pages the question is less science itself than its uncritical adoption. Marxists were convinced that they were the appointed and rightful heirs to the science of bourgeois society — a science that guaranteed success. The greatest insults in the standard Marxist dictionary were ''prescientific'', ''nonscientific'', "mystical", "utopian", and "romantic". Vulnerability to these charges intimidated the Marxist critics of science. The suppressed critiques took their revenge. Marxism succumbed to science; it shrivelled up into blueprints and state engineering. The most provocative interpretations of science migrated to those outside of the mainstream and to those outside of Marxism."
Greg Schofield Perth Australia g_schofield at dingoblue.net.au _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________
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