Vanilla Marxism is the abstract base class of political ideologies. You can't actually instantiate it, because Marx left too much unsaid when it came to the nuts and bolts of how he thought a society should function on a day-to-day basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism
> For the political ideology commonly associated with states governed by Communist parties, see Marxism–Leninism.
That was the state-of-the-art in classical economics when Marx branched from it. And his argument flows from it.
But the LTV breeds paradoxes. That's why, when the concept of subjective value was introduced, economics left LTV behind.
A thing is only valued according to what it is exchanged for.
So a single good actually has different values, at different points in time and space. The value of the labourer's efforts are a distinct exchange from the value of the good to the manufacturer, which is distinct again from the value when sold to the wholesaler, distinct from the value at the retailer, distinct from the retailer to the consumer, distinct again the value between the buyer and the buyer's son who inherited it, distinct again to the value at a lawn sale, distinct again to the value at a swap meet, distinct again to the value at a recycling centre ...
There was no "real" or "true" value to be expropriated here, so the Marxist critique basically falls to pieces. It continues to be attractive because it makes sense to people who are unaware of more modern economics, because it predicts cyclical behaviour in capitalist economies and because it finishes with some hand-wavy eschatological futurism that sounds really pleasant.
1. Ideology is not a dirty word. It's just a noun that describes any large-scale philosophy that focuses on political or economic issues.
2. Referring back to that definition, Marxism is very much an ideology. Claiming that it isn't is just playing word games.
3. All that aside, focusing in on quibbling over a word like that, to the exclusion of addressing any of the actual content of the statement that was being responded to, doesn't do much to add value to the conversation. Given the current context I don't think it would be unfair to suggest that it amounts to trying to meet a response to a courtier's reply with yet another courtier's reply.
i think the fact that you refer to marxism as a base class and marxist leninism as an instantiation mean that we fundamentally agree on the nature of the distinction between the two.
i think the nub of our disagreement is whether ideology is a loaded term, and whether marxism meets our personal definition of that word.
ideology (n) a system of ideas and ideals, especially
one that forms the basis of economic or
political theory and policy