Materialism, Method, Empiricism

The title of an early section of the German Ideology, "Materialist Method", is, on the face of it, peculiar in two respects.  First, Materialism is a thesis about the constituency of Existence, and is not a 'method'.  Second, it includes no reference to the Method usually associated with Marxism, namely Dialectics.  Indeed, the method of what follows is Empiricist and analytical, implicit in which is a significant Philosophical criticism that Marx does not pursue.  For, in the tradition of most of his Modern predecessors, he offers a foundational moment that serves his study as a point of departure.  But, rather than the Sense-Datum of the procedures of Descartes, Locke, and Hegel, alike, his fundamental element of human experience is the modification of material conditions for the production of sustenance, i. e. Labor.  That choice by itself exposes the arbitrary non-Empirical refinements that condition the extraction of a Sense-Datum from immediate Experience.  So, he has at his disposal, but does not pursue, a criticism of prominent rival methods, and, in particular, of what is conventionally known as 'Empiricism', the ideological premises of which are easily consequently exposed.