From: Howard Engelskirchen (hengels@zoom-dsl.com)
Date: Fri Feb 07 2003 - 01:53:25 EST
History as science, of course, not as a collection of facts and events but as a study of modes of production, their life processes and transitions. Only a single science, I take it, because knowledge is a social product and as a social product is a product of history. This is not to say that consciousness defines what can be known. Like labor, the production of knowledge is a process in which both nature and humans participate, and nature has priority. But Marx would not exempt, as Mannheim did, the physical sciences and mathematics from the sociology of knowledge. (For example, and I certainly do not meant the question in a simplistic or reductionist and mechanical sense, why do rates of change become significant enough in mathematics to be independently discovered in England and on the Continent at just the time the production of relative surplus value begins to emerge as a practical problem?) Also, generally reliable scientific methods have shown over the past two centuries a systematic tendency in human biology and genetics to ratify existing patterns of racial and social power and subordination. What scientists can imagine, the conceptual resources they deploy, can depend on, e.g. the amplitude of anti-imperialist struggle. Capital has been a powerful stimulus to the study of nature, but a comparable flowering of the human sciences no doubt depends still on a future free from the deformations of oppression and exploitation. From that perspective, once attained, Marx's point would no doubt be easier to see. In solidarity, Howard ----- Original Message ----- From: "gerald_a_levy" <gerald_a_levy@msn.com> To: <ope-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu> Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 6:43 AM Subject: [OPE-L:8435] Re: History > Re the following from [8431]: > > > "We know only a single science, the science of history" (Marx, _The > > German Ideology_, Progress Publishers, p. 28). > > Is history, though, the "only" science? Indeed, is it a "science" > at all? Why or why not? > > Solidarity, Jerry > > > > >
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