Statistics

[¿Que?]

How do you guys feel about using statistics as empirical evidence for Marxism? You could essentially operationalize certain Marxist concepts, like value, socially necessary labor time, etc and run statistics on them using publicly available data sets. The only draw back is that you have to define your concepts in such a manner so as to fit with the existing variables in the data set, so they may not strictly represent the concept you're trying to explain. Is this a useless application of Marxism, or valuable?

[JazzRemington]

That's one of the problems of using other peoples' data sets. For instance, the US Government keeps economic statistics, including employment data. They don't keep statistics on, say, the number of bourgeoisie or proletariats; however, they DO keep statistics for "employed" and "employee", and they further break it down into industry.

You CAN use statistics to provide empirical support for Marxism, or anarchism, or anything. But you have to be tolerant of errors because you don't know how the other people collected the data you're using.