Perhaps it amounts to heresy to call Karl Marx a positivist. By the same token, with the execption of a few like Comte or Mach, no one ever claimed to be a Positivist, though Mill, Spencer, Durkheim Tarde, Wundt or Lundberg were all as posivists. This paper also does not make Marx into a positivist, it only attempts to point to the similarities between the Marxist methodology and those of the early sociologists, like Comte and Spencer, who were positivists.
No attempt is made here to denounce the dia- lectical basis of Marx's methodology. Nor is positivism posed against dialectics as is done by a number of German sociologists (see Adorno et. al. 1976 and Gellner 1985). This essay is not even directed at exploring the merits or demirits of positivism vis a vis dialectics, nor even to salvage positivism by ancho- ring it in the works of Marx. It is, however, expected here that a demonstration of parallelism between Marxist methodology and early sociology will go a long way to bridge the ever widening gap between