Method, Description, Prescription

A Method is a manner of proceeding, so an empirical report of humans and their material conditions is not a "Materialist Method", despite the characterization of it as such by Marx-Engels. Rather, that report is a species of Empiricism, distinctive as a more rigorous effort to avoid the abstractions implicit in the tradition spanning Locke and Hegel, notably the extraction of a sense-datum from the flux of concrete experience. Still, the expression of an allegiance to an Empiricist Method involves a further abstraction that they miss in that passage, though one implicit in one of Marx's insights elsewhere--that what they are most immediately doing is writing, and Empiricist writing is a species of Description, the primary alternative of which is Prescription, a contrast implicit in the 'interpret the world'-'change the world' contrast in the Theses. Now, a Discourse on Method that begins by distinguishing Description from Prescription can be significant for Marxism, because the conflation of the two methods is one of most powerful modes of Ideology, in which a variable preference is disguised as an immutable fact, e. g. most Theologies. Likewise, for example, a more conscientious treatment of Method at the outset of the German Ideology can avoid a conflation of History, which is Descriptive, and a projection of a course of action by which Capitalism is transformed into Socialism, which is Prescriptive.