ABSTRACT
In studying revolutions, “one must always distinguish between the material transformation in the economic conditions essential to production and the juridical, political, religious, artistic or philosophical, in short ideological, forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out”. The reason why Marxists have blurred the distinction between science and ideology, which is inextricably involved in Marx’s classical statement of his theory of history, is that this distinction is inconsistent with Marx’s own philosophy of Dialectic Materialism. Plekhanov carried his philosophic rectification of Marx’s natural opinion about ideology and science to the point of asserting that Das Kapital itself is not fundamentally more scientific than the bourgeois economics. The fundamental difference between them is that the bourgeois economics reflects an earlier, and the Marxian a later stage in the historic process: “Human society in its development passes through certain phases to which correspond certain phases of development of social science.
