> Marx attempted to create a scientific, as opposed to moral critique of
> capitalism. Nonetheless, Marx was unable to suppress his indignation
> when describing the actual functioning of capitalism. These outbursts
> do not negate Carrol's point, but suggest that we might do well to
> avoid being doctrinaire.
I don't think this accurately represents Marx's idea of "science."
His belongs to a tradition in ontology and philosophical anthropology for which:
"The business of science is simply to bring the specific work of the reason, which is in the thing, to consciousness."
It's on the basis of this understanding of the "facts" and their scientific treatment that he claimed:
"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."
It's also on this basis that he can say of Capital (which starts out from classical political economy and the commodity) that in it he confined himself "to the mere critical analysis of actual facts, instead of writing receipts [4] (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future."
One key expression of "the work of reason" in capitalism is the capitalist "passions," these being an expression, for Marx as for Hegel, of "the dialectic of negativity."
The main capitalist "passion" is sadistic greed, a motive that, though radically inconsistent with rational motives, supplies "the impelling and actuating force for accomplishing deeds shared in by the community at large."
Thus England in India
"was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution."
Though moralistic judgments of the "passions" are invalid, ethical judgments are essential. The "passions" work to develop the capabilities required to bring an end to the "estrangement" they represent. This has an essential ethical dimension as is shown by Marx's accounts of how we would produce if we "carried out production as human beings."
Consequently, to be able to develop, by means of a "scientific critique of capitalism," true reality as the obligation and the final goal of existing reality, the "critic" must know this ethical content, the capabilities required to actualize it and the way existing reality works to develop them, i.e. contributes in an essential way to the development of "the true human being" capable of creating and living in "true reality."
This is what Marx, writing in 1877, claimed to have done in Capital.
"At the end of the chapter ['(Capital, French Edition, 1879, p. 315)'] 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."
The "new economic order" is "the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man."
Ted