ABSTRACT
The specifically ‘Marxist’ theme in the analysis of the bourgeoiscapitalist world is not its self-alienation, but its ‘anatomy’, its skeletal structure-that is to say, its political economy-a term which grasps economic existence and consciousness in a dialectical unity. At first glance, the emphasis on the anatomy of bourgeois society signifies no more than a change of emphasis from ‘bourgeois society’ in Hegel’s sense to the ‘system of needs’ as such. It depicts the material relations of production as the skeletal structure of this society. At the same time, this approach also includes the much broader and more questionable thesis of the fundamental importance of the material conditions of life as the determinant of all other aspects, which eventually crystallises in the vulgar Marxist thesis of socalled ‘real base’ as the foundation on which there arises a superstructure that is to be interpreted as purely ideological. It is in this form, which is not merely vulgarised but disfigured, that Marxism has generally become the object of both criticism and defence. This is how Weber also regarded Marxism and combated it as a dogmatically economistic historical materialism.
