Pervasive to Marxist thought is the (implied) idea that theory takes precedent. By dismissing the only empirical reality we have, the Marxist method seeks to find the ‘true’ meaning concealed by ‘bourgeois’ facts.
You thus get things like Engels’ ‘dialectic of nature’, which attempts to revise our ‘bourgeois’ understanding of the history of science because it doesn’t fit the hidden ‘truth’ of Marxist theory. And we do not need much evidence to know that this theory was wrong.
Einstein himself read Engels’ attempt to decode the history of science and its abounding theories using Marxist dialectic, only to find a work of ‘little interest’ to those who understand physics and the history of science.
Engels’ theories have since been disproven by the advances made in science. If Marxist theory is so ‘scientific’ and deals with ‘truth’ instead of ideology (which is what the likes of Lukács and Gramsci had extracted from Marx’s work), then why was this so horribly wrong?
On a side-note, @EricRWeinstein is probably the closest we have to a modern Engles in this regard.
You can follow @MrTomMcKenna.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: