Engels often goes into the nature of science within the dialectical tradition within several of his works, in particular “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”. If anything, part of the overall project of Marxism is an attempt to explain the metaphysical dialectical nature of science and how it can be used for more than just explaining discreet natural phenomena, but actually applied to the level of economics, history, religion, culture and society. The difference between “Scientific socialism” and “utopian socialism” is the scientific aspect and application of it.

What Marxism really is, at it’s core, is an attempt to expand on the scientific method to all aspects of life. And within that is a critique at how the bourgeois bargain, delay, twist or deny any kind of inconvenient scientific and materialist study. In modern times this is explicitly done by separating the “social sciences (soft)” from the “real sciences (hard)”, when all of these subjects are extremely epistemologically related, with only a couple, that is to say philosophy and mathematics, standing out as truely epistimlogically distinct subject matters, and even they are extremely related subjects, historically speaking. For instance, the idea that ‘political science’ and ‘economics’ are considered two distinct subjects will never not be hilarious to me. Hell the fact that ‘anthropology’ and ‘sociology’ are different subjects mostly boils down to if you were taught by the British or the French, and if you were studying someone else’s culture and society or your own. Nonsense distinctions.

When Engels is discussing it they are just at the beginning of that separation process, with all the greatest political thinkers of the era (including Adam Smith) begin called ‘political-economists’, when their subject matters addressed all manner of things philosophical, mathematical, historical, metaphysical, political, economic, biological, psychological (not as much, since it wasn’t as established, but to some extent), etc.

There is less so a critique of science as a method in of itself but that is because Marxism is in the opposite side of Hegelian mystic idealism. The Hegelians were more about those kinds of critiques, which as Young Hegelians, I am sure Marx and Engels were exposed to.

Idrk any specifically Marxist books on the matter, but check out Local vs Global Science edited by Sillitoe. Collection of essays by practicing scientists looking at the failure of science to be sufficiently materialist (in that, when faced with locals claims about the world, scientists response often tends towards denying such claims instead of actually testing them).

Lewontin’s Biology as Ideology is also good, though a bit old. I think I’ve read somewhere that he’s a Marxist as well as a biologist. Book looks at how many scientists are really “believers” in science moreso than testers, and a large part of this is how science is taught in schools.

You also cant go wrong with Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, he also isnt a Marxist, but his analysis is solid and does well integrating the relationship between the economics and the scientific theories

https://us.politsturm.com/science-has-become-less-innovative