I’ve been trying to think about other angles of relevance in terms of this discussion about the relationship between the practice of a science and the social context in which the science develops/is placed.
Science is a socially situated practice -and political economy, sociology, anthropology (whatever) especially. It seems Marx was both aware, and trying to make his readers aware, of this through the German example.
Political economy, whether bourgeois or socialist, is not equipped to totalize. Nevertheless the ’science of capitalism’ (if you will) and later on the ’science of socialism’ (if you will) did just that, and to a certain extent applied a total analysis/explanation on particular societies in particular phases of their development.
Even though capitalism is now total, its expression is not, and the analysis, crtique, and reaction we bring to it cannot be satisfied with (reduced to) a totalizing approach. We must always bear in mind, in science, the particular historical, material, cultural -social contexts.
For example, today I had a conversation about communism’s many failures, and in particular Cuba. Do we point to Cuba and say ‘communism doesn’t work!?’ Or do we look at Cuba and try to assess and understand the path it took in relation to its particular historical and social conditions?
In a sense we are anticipating elements of ‘post-modernism’, though I would never be so vulgar as to suggest Marx was ‘post-modern’.
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