http://www.marxistlibr.org/meth.html The issue here is the issue of scientific method, of theory. This issue has been dodged, and dodged most successfully, in the Anglo-American world up to this moment. It has been dodged by Marxists as much as by bourgeois social scientists. (I shall not be concerned here with the way this problem presents itself in the natural sciences.) The issue has been dodged successfully and for good material and historical reasons. These reasons constitute in fact in a major way the subject matter of the Baran-Sweezy work: they are to be found in the effects of first British and then American imperialism. It was the profitability of British and American imperialism that made it possible for Anglo-American social scientists to stop their inquiry into the world in which they live at the point of describing it without being forced, by the reality of emerging social contradictions, to analyze the nature of that reality. The same conditions which provided the largely external profits that corrupted, temporarily, large sections of the Anglo-American labor movement, also corrupted the Anglo-American intelligentsia into pragmatism, that a-theoretical attitude of the American people which is often described but rarely analyzed.
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