> In other words economics (including "Marxist" economics) is not and
> cannot be a science, of _any_ kind. (Marx's Critique needs to be
> seen in
> terms of the use of the German word for "science" in the mid-19th-c.)
> The better economists more or less recognize that they are not engaged
> in a scientific but a historical project. You can recognize them by
> their reluctance to make _any_ kind of forecast except highly
> abstractr
> ones in the form of if...then.
The sense of "science" appropriated by Marx is that found in Hegel's "higher dialectic of the conception" that makes it "the business of science" "simply to bring the specific work of the reason, which is in the thing, to consciousness." http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/printrod.htm
This is the sense found in Marx's idea of "critique" (as elaborated as early as 1843 in the following passage from a letter to Ruge):
"Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm
This sense makes "forecast" possible, i.e. "from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality" the "critic" can "develop the true reality as its obligation and final goal."
This sense is retained throughout Marx's writing. For instance, in the 1877 letter to the editor of the Otecestvenniye Zapisky, he writes, summing up what he claims to have demonstrated "scientifically" in the "critique" that is Capital:
"At the end of the chapter [26 of Capital] the historic tendency of production is summed up thus: That it itself begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer; that capitalist property, resting as it actually does already on a form of collective production, cannot do other than transform itself into social property. At this point I have not furnished any proof, for the good reason that this statement is itself nothing else than the short summary of long developments previously given in the chapters on capitalist production." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm
Ted