10 SOCIAL SCIENTIST numbing vocabulary of American 'political science' in which'system5 and 'function5 (or, in India, 'input') are leading terms—the lives of any human beings whatever. Marxology is a little more complex. For what purports to be a 'Marxist' mode of perception, now becomes in general incorrigibly petit-bourgeois and philistine, reduces in its epistemology the objective circumstances of the actual process of transformation in the conditions of the people in a revolutionary society to a political and intellectual periphery, where this transformation is regarded as merely the province of'empiricism5, and the observation and report of it as'impressionism5. Once more, the ground (cleared of human beings and their lives) becomes safe for the purities and verities of, this time, a disembodied 'Marxist' analysis. The reason, simply, is that this bourgeois and petit-bourgeois 'Marxism5 prefers the metaphysical idealism and abstract categories of thought to which Marxism, particularly (but not only) in Europe, has in classical fashion been almost wholly reduced. This Marxism, appropriated, like most intellectual and ideological production, as the private property of the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois intelligentsia of the decadent political cultures of west and east—for the same process has occurred in India—has been re-Hegelianized; and Marx himself can be found regularly standing on his head in the pages of the New Left Review and its counterparts in other countries. Moreover., these acrobatics are conducted under the supervision of what is, both in effect and intent, an alternative 'Marxist5 ruling class, whiling away its leisure time—since it constitutes a new sub-class, that of the semi-employed, lumpen-intelligentsia—in the wings of the political stage, waiting (in hope) to take power over the proletariat of its own countries. Problem of Method This is a perhaps unwarrantedly long introduction to the subject of this short article, but it seeks to raise a fundamental problem. That is, that the abstract idealism of most of today's 'Marxist9 intellectual production—like its class counterpart, the political managerialism which dominates modern political science—is incapable of understanding (or even observing) the daily life of the people, whether encountered in China or India or in any other human social order. Moreover, an alienated 'political consciousness5 which has been gained exclusively or primarily from books, and from the results in print of the crisis of overproduction in 'Marxist' political analysis of the real-life activity and practice of others (once again made abstract as 'praxis9), can never understand that other 'consciousness' or knowledge which is founded not upon books and texts (though it may, and indeed must, be sharpened by them) but upon life; upon its miseries and struggles as in India, or its hardships and triumphs, as in China. And so the question which must be faced first is as follows. Which