Carrol, I am not arguing against anything you say here, but you should really try to take a look at Chomsky's own very interesting notions of what makes a theory, and why no "theories" in a strict sense have yet to develop in the humanities, in relation to human history, and in the so called "human-sciences" in general.
At least think about the descriptions of theory, and the history of science that Chomsky often presents in his polemics on these matters. I think they are important in ways people have simply not yet fully realized. They remained to be fleshed out by somebody and they should be fleshed out.
Marx in those parts of the Grundrisse (which Chomsky has probably never read, (unfortunately)) was simply wrong as far as I am concerned. Relations can be observed and described but not "theorized" unless he meant by "theorized", as he often does, "modeled", "abstracted", and "rationalized". But the depth of theory is not here. We can talk about this if you like. But as far as I can see we should probably not be sad that Marx didn't develop a model/explanation with theoretical depth. In that case the "theory" would probably be drained of _qualia_ [obscurantist word-warning!] in the same way all scientific theories so far are drained of the "what it is like" for the world to be according to this or that scientific theory. I think that of Althusser was correct about one idea, it was that in order for historical materialism to be a science it must be "anti-humanist." No science is a humanism in Althusser's sense of the word. And I think we should be happy (contra-Althusser) that the tradition of Marx is in fact a humanism, in other words that Marx and Engels didn't completely succeed in their Promethean task of establishing a science of history.
Marx and Engels explicitly wanted to create a scientific theory that had all of the rigorousness of Darwin's brand of evolutionary theory. Whether they succeeded or failed should be a different debate, than the one over the notion of ideology or the creation of ideological mystification and obscurantism that most intellectuals in all society find is, in part, their function. I doubt, whether Marx or Engels could even understand, given the time they lived in, how little real knowledge we human beings actually possess, how very thin our theoretical knowledge is, and to fall into bad metaphysics, how really negligible knowledge is in fact is in the universe as a whole. They were true inheritors of the Enlightenment, at the intersection of Romanticism, and they should be praised for their impulses. But it also provided them with too much confidence in the sciences and too much confidence in the unbounded possibilities of human knowledge, confidence that was misplaced. In fact a confidence I believe was an ideological mystification, in which they never realized they were entangled.
Now to get back to Chomsky, and his "mechanical Marxism": He has analized the role, the ideological function, of intellectuals, the societal function and defined limits of the university; how academics by institutional pressures not to try to talk to people but to mystify people with their expertise, or with the extreme narrowness of their chosen subject of study, in a way that Miles explicitly rejects, and in a way that I have never heard you acknowledge. It is part of the institutional role of intellectuals to sometimes mystify and sometimes obscure and to be the guardian-priesthood of knowledge. It is the institutional role of intellectuals to make sure that the wrong kind of learning doesn't get into the wrong hands, that it gets into the hands of the right people and then in only a limited form. It is part of what I have called an _ethics of rhetoric_ when an intellectual betrays his class and his masters, and tries to do just the opposite. I'll take Chomsky's "mechanical Marxism" as a starting point for analysis, because I think it is both historically correct and an accurate description of the assigned role of intellectuals in our society.
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