I didn't downvote (and I wish they'd just remove that silly feature from this site), but if I had to guess it would come down to a few things:
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.
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.