Kondylis identifies himself with Marxism, broadly understood. In a recent essay, “Marxism, Communism, and the History of the Twentieth Century,” Kondylis offers this revealing opinion: “The planetary social project of Communism failed not because of moral or economic inferiority but because the national power of Russia encountered the superior national power of the United States.” Furthermore, “Never before has the Marxist view of history been as true and current as it is now in the initial phase of a planetary history,” particularly in determining social relations and the “ideological” forms that they take.[2] In my German correspondence with him, Kondylis makes the point that, unlike me, “he stands far closer to Marx than to [the German legal thinker] Carl Schmitt.”[3] His detailed analysis of social class and of ideological consciousness as reflected in culture point back to Marx and to the twentieth-century Marxist interpreter of intellectual history, George Lukacs. Kondylis underlines these connections whenever he can.