I will have to agree with Andie on this point.  I have an undergraduate
degree in physics plus coursework in biology and chemistry, and by
trade, I am a software engineer.  So I think I have some notion of what
science is supposed to look like.  I would add that there have been
plenty of fairly hardcore analytical philosophers of science, who have
thought Marx to be a scientist.  G.A. Cohen, Richard Miller, Jon
Elster, Dan Little, being just few names who come to mind.  And some of
these people have gone out of the way to show how some of Marx's
theories like his materialist conception of history can be given as
rigorous a scientific formulation as you could want or expect from a
social scientific theory.  

-- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen@yahoo.com> wrote:

Moralism pure and simple, huh. No explanatory theses
about the way bourgeois society works. No insights
into which relationships are important in
understanding the dynamics of social processes the
activities of different social groups. No hypothesis
about which variables are independent or dependent in
understanding the way people think or the nature of
government, education, the press, religion. No
predictions about the direction and future of the
economy or its shape. I wonder how I have been
managing to misread all those things into the old
scold for all these years. 

Of course I agree with you that Marx's official
anti-moralism isn't consistent with the attitude that
he obviously manifests throughout his work, but let's
not even bother to defend the rest of this ridiculous
hyperbole. Someone whose conception of science is so
far from mine as to exclude Marx from its ambit is
talking about a different phenomenon than what I, as
political scientist and philosopher of social and
natural science, take to be the sort of thing science
is. In case you feel like sneering at social science,
I was originally a historian and philosopher of
natural science and have graduate training in physics,
aced QM, thermodynamics and stat mech, special and
gen'l relativity, and basic classical mechanics. So I
know what "real" "hard" science is supposed to look
like. Marx qualifies.  

--- Carl Remick <carlremick@hotmail.com> wrote:

> >From: andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen@yahoo.com>
> >
> >... I've heard people argue
> >that the prophetic impulse was important for Chuck;
> >his family was rabbinal and his mother never really
> >converted, so he woulda probably got the whole
> >megilla. He knew his Old Testament too and there is
> a
> >sort of prophetic feel to his writings.
> 
> I think the most indefensible thing ever said about
> KM is that he was not a 
> moralist.  His thought -- whatever you term it
> (knowing his rejection of the 
> term Marxism) -- is the morality that dare not speak
> its name.  KM's entire 
> persona and rhetorical style are 100% consistent
> with the prophetic model 
> that abounds in the Old Testament -- ripe with
> denunciations of corruption 
> and oppression, thunderous in asserting stern
> retribution is nigh.  The 
> notion that KM's work bears any serious relationship
> to science is a joke.  
> It's moralism pure and simple; the patina of
> "science" was sprayed on simply 
> to give Victorian bourgeoisie the willies and induce
> them not to dismiss KM 
> as a common scold.
> 
> Carl
> 
>
_________________________________________________________________
> Don't get caught with egg on your face. Play
> Chicktionary!  
>
http://club.live.com/chicktionary.aspx?icid=chick_hotmailtextlink2
> 
> > ___________________________________
>
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