>Marxism's claim to scientific status ought not to be so dogmatic as a
>demand that it must be accepted. After all, scientific thought is
>characterised by its provisional nature, religious thought by its
>absolute nature.
>
>When Marx himself talked of approaching the problem scientifically, he
>meant something like, thinking deeply about the matter in hand, i.e. not
>accepting the immediate appearance of things. As he says, lacking
>microscopes and such, one has to use the power of abstraction to capture
>the underlying structure of society. In context, he often means
>something like 'objective' when he says scientific.
This strikes me as a much more plausible account of what Marx meant by "scientific" than trying to make Marxism fit the mold of present-day physical science. That Marxism tries to look beneath the surface of things seems pretty clear. It's provisional nature nature appears well accepted in some Marxist circles.
Marxism's objectivity is another matter, and a more difficult one. But since I question the absolute objectivity of the hard sciences, it's hardly a slight on Marxism to think it isn't any more objective than physics is.
Scott Martens