ABSTRACT
A CONSIDERATION of the phenomenon called “Marxism” has an obvious starting point in Marx’s own reflections on the subject of intellectual systematizations. According to him, they were either “scientific” (in which case they entered into the general inheritance of mankind), or “ideological,” and then fundamentally irrelevant, for every ideology necessarily misconceived the real world, of which science (Wissenschaft) was the theoretical reflection. Yet it is a truism that Marxism has itself in some respects acquired an ideological function. How has this transmutation come about, and what does it tell us about the theoretical breakthrough which Marx effected and which his followers for many years regarded as a guarantee against the revival of “ideological” thinking within the movement he had helped to create?
