Carroll: Idiot. Did you read my last paragraph?
*** [Note: Besides being the Discoverer of Capitalism in the same sense as Newton was the Discoverer of Gravity and Einstein the Discoverer of Releativity, Marx _also_ had many interesting and wonderful things (sometimes correct, sometimes not) to say about all sorts of things: history in general (there is no sicence of history), politics; revolutionary thought, anthropology, epistemology, industry, the particular capitalism of his day, human capacities, history, culture, etc etc etc. Personally, I think any intellectual who doesn't explore these things in Marx is cheating him/herself, but none of these things belong to "Marxism" rigorously conceived, which is the theoretical understanding of capitalism.]****
^^^^^ CB: .Note: Carroll has a number of fundamentally wrong ideas on what Marxism is, at least according to Marx and Engels' version of Marxism.
Marxism is historical materialism. It _is_ the science of history since the breaking up of the ancient communes, not just a theory of capitalism. It's theory in a word is that "history is a history of class struggles." "Laws of development" refers to scientific laws. ^^^
"Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.
But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark."
Frederick Engels’ Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx Highgate Cemetery, London. March 17, 1883
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/burial.htm