[...] Lenin would certainly have rejected the idea that Marxism was a critique of political economy: for him it was a critique of bourgeois political economy only, which finally transformed political economy itself into a real science. But the subtitle of Capital indicates something more than this—it suggests that political economy as such is bourgeois and must be criticized tout court. This second dimension of Marx’s work is precisely that which culminates in his theory of alienation and fetishism. The great problem for us is to know whether and how these two divergent directions of Marx’s work can be held together in a single system. Can a purely scientific theory contain within itself a discourse on alienation? The problem has not yet been resolved.