[beepbooptheory]

I guess I am not really versed in this world, but I can't help but think that these people should read more Marx! At least for some precedent in this kind of thinking.

Like whatever you think about capitalism/communism and all that, Marx first and foremost gave the idea of a science to human history itself, divorced from any given political ideology, and truly extending across the lines of individuals, institutions, and nations.

Maybe I am missing the point, but its not like Marx runs counter to any of this necessarily. It's just when I read something like "maybe we should consider history itself as science, with forecasts and underlying assumptions," I just think about the century-worth of literature in Marxist thought that is doing just that!

[metaphorhacker]

Engels famously compared Marx to Darwin in his eulogy. But Marx's problem was that he tried to predict too much into the future and was shown to be wrong in almost all of it - most notably the only communist revolutions happening only in agrarian states.

Darwin (and Wallace) only provided a model of natural selection that predicts pretty much nothing about the outcome, only about the process that will be involved and the general shape of the outcome.

So Darwin is now (rightly) seen as a great scientist and Marx (rightly) isn't seen as a great historian. But the general shape of the Marxian model is still useful to many people. Even if it's not very predictive in any useful way.