Capital as a Philosophical Horizon: Marx and the Critique of Capitalist Modernity
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By Dr. Adnan Bozan
? Introduction:
In the history of human thought, few books have provoked as much controversy, exerted such profound influence, and triggered major transformations as Karl Marx’s Capital. This work was not merely an economic study of markets, production, or exchange; it was a comprehensive philosophical project that penetrated the deep structures of modern human existence, re-interrogated history, time, society, and the human condition, from a radical critique of capitalism—not merely as an economic system but as an existential regime that reshapes the human being in the image of the commodity and transforms social relations into relations between things.
Capital was written at a time when Europe was moving toward the consolidation of the industrial capitalist system and celebrating the triumphs of the bourgeoisie as the end of historical struggle and the symbol of progress and liberation. However, Marx—deeply influenced by Hegelian thought, Feuerbach’s materialism, and English political economy—rejected this triumphant narrative. He chose instead to view capitalism not as fate or the culmination of reason’s development, but as a historically contingent and ultimately transient phase, founded on contradiction and alienation, and on systematic exploitation rather than freedom.
1. The Importance of Capital in Modern Philosophical and Political Thought
Capital is one of the pillars of modern thought, and an indispensable foundation for understanding the nature of the contemporary world. Not only because it laid the groundwork for what became known as Marxist thought, but also because it introduced a methodological shift in how we approach economics, politics, history, and the human being.
Capital represents an epistemological rupture with both the idealist philosophy that preceded Marx and the classical political economy that paved the way for capitalism. It stands in opposition not only to Hegelian metaphysics, which regarded the world as a reflection of Reason, but also to classical economists (like Adam Smith and David Ricardo), who naturalized the market and attributed to it a moral character—ignoring the relations of power, conflict, and historical conditions embedded in the structure of production.
In Capital, we do not encounter an abstract economy, but one rooted in the structures of social conflict, historical time, class transformation, and the material constitution of existence. It is a book against reification, against the reduction of the human to a productive function, and against the transformation of labor into a new form of slavery in the name of freedom and the market.
2. The Central Question:
Is Capital Merely an Economic Analysis, or a Philosophical Project for Critiquing Capitalist Modernity?
This is the central problematic of this research: Can Capital be reduced to a mere monumental economic text? Was Marx's aim simply to offer a theoretical alternative to capitalist economics? Or is the book, at its core, a philosophical project aimed at critiquing modernity itself—a project that promised human liberation but ultimately led to new forms of alienation and estrangement?
Answering this question requires delving into the philosophical architecture of Capital, and understanding how the dialectics of “freedom/exploitation,” “human/commodity,” “labor/alienation,” and “capital/history” unfold. It entails rethinking foundational concepts such as human nature, time, history, society—and even time itself—through a materialist-dialectical lens.
Many fragmented readings have separated Marx the "philosopher" from Marx the "economist," treating Capital solely as belonging to the latter domain. Yet this separation is not only inaccurate—it is misleading. The essence of the book is a structural and comprehensive critique of capitalist modernity, with all its associated notions of market, individual, fr
eedom, property, reason, and power.
3.Methodology: Historical–Dialectical Materialism
This study adopts the historical-dialectical materialist method employed by Marx himself—a method for interpreting both existence and history. For Marx, dialectics no longer represented the movement of ideas in a collective consciousness (as in Hegel), but the real material movement of conflict within human society—within labor, production relations, and historical processes—not above them.
In this approach:
History is not read as isolated events but as a dynamic structure of contradictions.
Reality is not reducible to ideas but is understood through its material conditions.
The human is not an abstract subject, but a product of social relations.
This methodology is not merely a tool but a worldview—one that sees every social structure as carrying its own internal contradiction, and every system as harboring the seeds of its own collapse. Capitalism, in Marx’s eyes, is not to be criticized only from the outside, but from within its own logic: surplus value, commodity fetishism, the cycle of production, the law of accumulation, and its volatile class structure.
4. Central Hypotheses of the Research
Based on the central question and adopted methodology, this research proposes the following fundamental hypotheses:
Capital is not merely an economic text but a philosophical project seeking to understand the existential structure of capitalism as a form of human alienation.
For Marx, capitalism is not just an economic system, but a comprehensive mode of being that reshapes time, space, social relations, and human subjectivity.
Marx’s method in Capital is a dialectical-materialist extension of modern philosophy, transcending it by uniting thought and life, theory and practice.
Marx’s critique of capitalism is, at its core, a critique of Western modernity in its liberal form, instrumental reason, isolated individualism, and the bourgeois notion of the human.
Reading Capital philosophically restores Marxism as a comprehensive critical philosophy—not merely an economic ideology.
With this introduction, this study does not merely place itself within a tradition that reads Capital as a work transcending the bounds of political economy, but seeks to establish an approach that views the text as a decisive philosophical moment in the development of modern reason. Capital is not treated merely as an analytical document of the economic structure of a specific era, but as a critical mirror reflecting the formation of the modern human under the logic of value—where human relations are abstracted, alienated, and reified.
In this sense, Capital is not read solely through concepts such as market, labor, and surplus value, but through what it reveals about the metaphysical structure of modern reality—a reality in which commodities become quasi-spiritual entities, bearing values that are not inherent to their material nature, but conferred by a complex web of social relations that imbue them with a false sanctity. In this way, Marx does not merely describe what we possess, but analyzes what we become under the domination of this mode of life, where the self is reduced to a function within a merciless system of exchange, and consciousness becomes false—identifying with the very conditions that oppress it.
From this philosophical horizon, the study approaches Marx’s text as a passage from the rigid geography of economics to the pliable space of philosophy, where concepts like “labor,” “value,” and “commodity” become ontological tools for analyzing the existence of the alienated human being—not merely explanatory tools for understanding the structure of the market. Thus, Capital is not merely an attempt to understand the capitalist system, but a comprehensive critique of modernity itself: of fragmented time, instrumental reason, and the self ensnared in the web of exchange.
In this way, the research participates in a long hermeneutical project, seeing Capital as a work that lays the foundation for an alternative epistemology—one that reveals what classical liberal models conceal about the self, freedom, justice, and the world.
? Chapter One: The Philosophical and Intellectual Roots of Marx
Marx and Hegelian Philosophy: From Idealist to Materialist Dialectics
The Influence of Feuerbach and the New Materialism
The Break with Speculative Philosophy: Toward a Practical Philosophy of History
From Classical Political Economy to the Critique of Political Economy
When we reflect on Karl Marx’s intellectual project, we find ourselves facing a highly complex structure of thought—one that does not emerge from a vacuum, nor is it confined to political economy, as many assume. Rather, it is deeply rooted in a rich philosophical soil that extends from Hegel and German Idealism to French materialist philosophy and English political economy. Therefore, Capital cannot be approached merely as a critical analysis of capitalism without deconstructing the philosophical and intellectual layers that shaped Marx’s consciousness and laid the groundwork for his total project—one that seeks not only to interpret the world but to change it.
In this context, the chapter raises a fundamental question: What are the philosophical elements that shaped Marx? Was he, as he once described himself, an “inverted Hegelian”? Or did he transcend Hegel to establish a new philosophy that deconstructs modernity from within? Was the materialism he embraced merely a reaction to idealism, or was it an epistemological leap into the concrete history of the alienated human within the world of the market?
Marx cannot be understood without understanding Hegel. Hegel’s dialectic—which sees contradiction as the motor of both history and consciousness—was foundational for Marx’s grasp of class struggle and historical transformation. But Marx made a revolutionary move: he turned Hegelian dialectics from heaven to earth, from Idea to matter, from Absolute Spirit to concrete social relations. In doing so, he went beyond Hegelian idealism, which saw thought as the essence of the world, and declared that the world is built upon relations of production—not the ideas of individuals.
But Marx’s roots do not end with Hegel. He was also influenced by 18th-century French materialism, particularly the works of Holbach, Lucretius, and Diderot, who saw the human as a natural being governed by material necessity. However, Marx infused this materialism with a historical and dialectical dimension. His materialism was neither rigid nor deterministic; it was a historical materialism that saw human labor as a transformative force capable of reshaping the world.
English political economy provided Marx with analytical tools to understand the mechanisms of capitalism, but he moved beyond the frameworks of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Marx demonstrated that value does not originate in the market, but in abstract labor—and that surplus value is a form of exploitation masked by the laws of free exchange.
In light of all this, Marx cannot be viewed as a mere product of disparate influences. Rather, he represents a convergence point of three major currents: Hegelian dialectics, French materialism, and English political economy. Yet Marx’s true genius lies in his ability to reshape these traditions into a new philosophical structure—what might be called a philosophy of material history or a critical ontology of social being.
Thus, this chapter aims not merely to list the influences on Marx, but to interrogate how these influences were transformed within his project into critical tools for understanding the human being, the world, and social relations as historically contingent structures—not eternal truths.
First: Marx and Hegelian Philosophy – From Idealist to Materialist Dialectics
It is nearly impossible to approach the philosophical structure of Karl Marx’s thought without pausing—at length—on the relationship that bound him to Hegel. Not merely as a “philosophical teacher,” but as the greatest theoretical challenge Marx had to overcome from within—that is, from the very heart of dialectical reason itself. Among all the philosophers who influenced Marx, Hegel remains the most present—and the most problematic—because he did not merely offer analytical tools, but imposed a comprehensive intellectual architecture about humanity, history, and reality. Overcoming this architecture was only possible by reconstructing it on entirely new foundations.
1. Hegel: Dialectics as the Logic of History and Reason
In Hegel’s philosophy, dialectics form the core of the development of both thought and reality. The world, from this perspective, is neither static nor linear but evolves through internal conflicts—where every moment of existence contains within it its own contradiction. From this internal conflict arises a higher, more developed form of truth. This movement—beginning with a thesis, confronted by its antithesis, and then sublated in a synthesis—is what drives the movement of both thought and reality.
Hegel expresses this process through his vision of history as the gradual realization of Spirit (Geist), which rationalizes itself through the institutions of the state, religion, and morality, ultimately reaching rational freedom. It is a philosophy that sees reality as a reflection of logic, and Reason as Spirit incarnate in the world.
2. The Young Marx: A Critical Disciple
Marx began his intellectual journey as a student within the school of Young Hegelians, which included thinkers such as Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. They sought to read Hegel through a radical lens—stripping him of his conservative tones and activating his critical elements. But through his engagement with social and economic realities, Marx soon encountered the limits of Hegel’s idealist logic, which projected a pre-existing rational structure onto the world and interpreted real contradictions as expressions of the Spirit’s internal process, rather than as tangible material struggles.
In his work Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx attacks the Hegelian structure of the state, which elevates the Absolute Idea as the subject of political thought. Marx argues that Hegel reverses the relationship between idea and reality: rather than starting from the material conditions that produce the state, Hegel begins with an abstract idea of the state and imposes it onto reality.
Here, the first signs of Marx’s philosophical reversal of Hegel begin to appear.
3. From Idealist to Materialist Dialectics
Marx’s transformation of Hegel was not a rejection of dialectics but a reversal of it—as he put it himself. He preserved the dialectical movement as a method for understanding change, but shifted its point of departure: dialectics was no longer a process of the Spirit or Idea, but a reflection of material conflict in history. Thus, dialectical motion moved from the realm of ideas to the realm of labor, from the history of thought to the history of production.
Marx wrote in the preface to Capital:
“My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain—that is, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject under the name of ‘Idea’—is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of the ‘Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”
This shift means that Marx reformulated dialectics as a socio-historical tool of analysis—one that explains contradictions within the structure of society, not merely within the logic of ideas. The main contradiction in capitalism, for example, is not a theoretical one, but a contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production—between labor and capital.
4. The Residual Hegelian Influence: Historical Dialectics as a Mode of Thinking
Yet Marx never abandoned the structural depth of Hegelian dialectics. Concepts such as alienation, reification, qualitative transformation, and the negation of the negation all originate from Hegelian ground, even as Marx reinterprets them through a materialist lens.
Alienation, as discussed in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, clearly bears Hegelian influence. But in Marx’s hands, it becomes a lived experience—endured by the worker stripped of their humanity under capitalist labor conditions.
Reification refers to the transformation of social relations into material things that appear independent of human beings—an expression of the separation between humans and the products of their labor.
5. Hegelianism as a Precondition for Constructing Critical Theory
Marx understood that to go beyond Hegel did not mean to discard him, but to critically appropriate him. Just as one cannot reject religion without understanding its historical function, one cannot refute Hegel without grasping the strength of his logic. Thus, Marxism—despite its materialist orientation—remains dialectical, retaining a rigorous rational structure that makes it a philosophical project no less complex than Hegel’s, even if it diverges from it in essence.
Like Hegel, Marx did not view the world as a series of adjacent phenomena, but as an interconnected structure governed by an internal logic of contradiction, change, and conflict. This is why Capital is not simply an economic work, but a dialectical construction that reshapes reality as a series of dramatic transformations resulting from the inner contradictions of the capitalist mode of production.
Conclusion
Marx is not an adversary of Hegelian dialectics but its rebellious heir—the son who read the father’s highest text, then tore the idealist cloak and rewove the fabric on the loom of reality. Marx looked into Hegel’s mirror and saw a world reflected upside down—where Idea gave birth to reality, and Reason wrote history with the ink of necessity. But Marx laid the mirror flat upon the ground, shattered its contemplative illusion, and made reality—not the Idea—the point of departure, and the productive human—not Absolute Spirit—the real motor of history.
What in Hegel was a struggle between ideas, becomes in Marx a struggle between people, between classes, between economic forces. The process of becoming is no longer the Spirit’s self-realization in history, but the material interaction between the base (economy, labor, means of production) and the superstructure (law, state, religion, philosophy). What Marx accomplished was not merely a shift in philosophical terminology—but a total revolution in worldview: from a closed universalism that conceived of history as rational destiny, to an open history shaped by power, domination, labor, and revolt.
The human being was no longer a shadow of a transcendent idea, but the center of historical action—a being who works, produces, alienates, and rebels.
If Hegelian philosophy ends in reconciliation with reality—as the realization of the Idea—Marxist philosophy begins in conflict with that reality and seeks to transcend it, not through thought alone, but through action: the radical transformation of production relations and the overthrow of a social order built upon human exploitation.
Marx did not reject Hegel simply because he was “idealist,” but because he was reconciled with a world that ought to be resisted and criticized. Marx did not demolish Hegel’s temple—he stormed it from within, overturned its idols, and built on its ruins a new philosophical project where dialectics is no longer a tool of conformity, but a force that exposes contradictions and becomes a means to both understand and transform the world.
In this sense, Marx is not a philosopher in the classical sense, but a revolutionary thinker who redefines philosophy itself as a tool for both analysis and change. The aim is no longer to interpret reality or uncover its inner logic, but to deconstruct its structures of domination, to expose the illusion of the "natural" and the "fixed," and to reveal how capitalism—at its historical peak—produces itself through concealing relations of domination beneath the masks of “value,” “market,” and “freedom.”
At the heart of this project, materialist dialectics remain a pulsating core—reminding us that reality can only be understood through its becoming, that history cannot be reduced to a linear narrative, and that the human is not raw material shaped by ideas, but an active subject shaping the conditions of their own existence.
With this philosophically charged heartbeat, Marx’s project begins not as a critique of a concept, but as an intervention in history—not to explain the world as it is, but to destabilize it, deconstruct it, and change it.
Second: The Influence of Feuerbach and the New Materialism – From the Critique of Religion to the Critique of Reality
If Marx began his intellectual journey in the shadow of Hegel, he soon veered away from idealist dialectics toward a more grounded and material foundation. Ludwig Feuerbach served as the bridge over which Marx crossed from metaphysical dialectics to the sensuousness of reality. But, as he later did with Hegel, Marx would also turn his critical arrows toward Feuerbach himself—thus laying the groundwork for a new materialism that surpassed both thinkers and heralded the birth of a philosophy rooted not in abstract contemplation nor in raw nature, but in historical and social reality.
Feuerbach, one of Hegel’s most prominent students, offered a radical critique of religion, especially in his work The Essence of Christianity, where he declared that God is nothing but a human projection, and that religion expresses humanity’s essential desires—alienated from itself. In this way, Feuerbach placed the human being at the center, not as a manifestation of abstract reason, but as a living, feeling, embodied creature. He dethroned God from the heights of philosophical idealism and re-centered philosophy on the human subject.
Marx saw in this critique a valuable entry point for deconstructing Hegelian discourse. He agreed with Feuerbach that religion is a form of alienation. But Marx posed a deeper question: Why does man become alienated in the first place? What compels him to negate himself in an abstract deity? What are the social roots of this alienation? Here begins the distance between Marx and his second intellectual father.
1. From the Critique of Religion to the Critique of Reality
Marx believed that although Feuerbach had courageously dismantled religious illusion, he remained imprisoned within a static materialism—one that viewed the human as a biological-natural being, disconnected from history and society. Feuerbach’s materialism was “contemplative”; it observed reality as it was and assumed that exposing illusions was enough to liberate humanity.
But Marx—armed with dialectical tools inherited from Hegel—saw that humans cannot be understood apart from their history, and that liberation does not occur through pure consciousness but through the transformation of the material conditions that produce that consciousness. For Marx, religion was not simply a mental error, but the symptom of a socially alienated world—one where productive forces are separated from producers, and man becomes estranged from himself, his labor, and others.
Thus, while Feuerbach was content to critique religion and call for a return to man’s “natural essence,” Marx dug deeper—to critique the social reality that creates the need for religion and alienates the human being through capitalist relations of production.
2. The Birth of Historical Materialism
From this critique of Feuerbach emerged the heart of Marx’s philosophy: historical materialism. Reality is not a fixed, natural order, but a continuously transforming social structure. The human being is not a mere natural entity, but an active subject within a web of economic and social relations. The task of philosophy, therefore, is not to contemplate existence, but to analyze and transform its material conditions.
In the Theses on Feuerbach—especially the famous eleventh thesis—Marx articulates this position clearly:
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Here, philosophy flips from mental activity to revolutionary project. The goal is no longer to understand consciousness or explain the idea of “man,” but to critique the world that renders man alien to himself. The objective is not to abolish God, but to abolish the conditions that make God necessary.
3. The New Materialism: From Nature to Struggle
Marx’s materialism is not a return to “nature,” as in Feuerbach, but an immersion in history. It is a materialism that views human existence as shaped by relations of labor and production, and sees ideas not as floating in a void but as arising from specific social structures.
Thus, Marxist materialism transcends the classical binary of “thought” and “reality” by establishing a dialectical relationship between the base (economy) and the superstructure (consciousness, religion, philosophy, law...). Change does not begin with changing ideas, but by transforming material reality—through class struggle and revolutionary practice.
Conclusion
Feuerbach was a pivotal station in the intellectual maturation of Marx. Yet in Marx’s view, Feuerbach remained suspended between new consciousness and revolutionary praxis. He restored the centrality of the human in philosophy, but did not analyze the historical conditions that alienate this human. Marx took from Feuerbach the call to return to man—but added: Man is not a fixed essence, but a being who forms himself through struggle, labor, and history.
In his critique of Feuerbach, Marx declares the birth of a new materialism—one that doesn’t stop at interpreting the world but seeks to change it; one that doesn’t treat man as a metaphysical essence, but as the product of social relations that can—and must—be transformed.
With this dialectical spirit, religion in Marx’s view is no longer merely an illusion to be exposed, but a symptom of a deeper existential crisis. Religious belief can only be explained through material suffering—and that suffering can only be understood through the economic relations that imprison man in specific historical conditions. Thus, the critique of religion becomes the first exercise in a broader critique of reality—not as an abstract object of knowledge, but as a historical field formed by forces, relations, contradictions, and struggle; by alienated labor and expropriated production.
As Marx moved from Feuerbach’s reflections to the economic structure of society, his critique shifted from false consciousness to false existence, from metaphysical illusion to material alienation. Ideas do not rule history—humans do, by producing the conditions of their existence through labor. And this labor can only be understood within the logic of class conflict, where contradictions are concentrated and where history is driven forward.
This transition—from the critique of religion to the critique of reality—does not mean abandoning philosophy, but redefining its task: from explaining human essence to analyzing the conditions that produce that essence as historical and transformable; from defining man as a biological being to interrogating him as a historical-class subject; from demanding truth to dismantling the power that monopolizes it in the hands of the ruling class.
From here begins the long and arduous road toward Capital—not merely as a book on economics, but as a philosophical-critical project that seeks to unveil the mechanisms of domination concealed behind the façades of market, exchange, labor, and property. Capital is the peak of that philosophical upheaval that began with Feuerbach and moved beyond Hegel—a culmination where political critique merges with economic analysis, where form and substance are deconstructed together, and where history is no longer the unfolding of spirit, but the battleground of forces.
In this light, Capital is not simply a study of money—it is a study of what man has become: a being reduced to value, a subject turned into a commodity, a network of relations presented as “natural” but born out of continuous historical violence. Money is not just a medium—it is a symbolic-material structure that governs human movement, reshapes their consciousness, their bodies, and their histories—all in service of accumulation, profit, and control.
Thus, the path from religion to economics—from Feuerbach to Capital—is not a change in subject matter, but a change in vision: one that sees the human not as an isolated individual but as a product of an economic-social world. On every page of Capital, Marx continues the effort he began in his critique of religion: to dismantle the false sacred—whether it be a god in the heavens, or a “hidden hand” in the market.
This is why Capital cannot be read as a purely economic text—it must be read as a profoundly philosophical one: shaped by Hegelian dialectics, forged through the negation of Feuerbach’s static materialism, and immersed in reality not as a given, but as a field of struggle, practice, and history.
Through this deep philosophical engagement, Marx does not aim to redefine capitalism—but to dismantle it from within, to expose its contradictions, summon its ghosts, and strip bare its structure: a system that monopolizes freedom while producing alienation, that promises progress while sinking into crises, that presents neutrality while concealing structural violence.
With this systematic philosophical revolt, Marx moves from the critique of religion to the critique of economy; from the critique of God to the critique of the market; from exposing illusions to revealing the structures that produce them. On this path, Capital ceases to be a book about money—it becomes a book about the alienated human, about a world that has come to measure life by profit, and value by salability.
In this sense, Capital is a distorted mirror of the modern world—and Marx does not write to reproduce it, but to shatter it.
Third: The Break with Speculative Philosophy – Toward a Practical Philosophy of History
At the heart of the Marxist project lies the moment of rupture—a foundational moment—marked by a double break: with Hegelian metaphysics on one hand, and with Feuerbach’s static materialism on the other. Out of this paradox arises the core of Marxist philosophy: a movement beyond contemplation toward action, beyond fixed essence toward historical transformation, and beyond philosophy as an interpretation of the world toward a new kind of philosophy—one grounded in practical critique of history and its becoming.
Speculative philosophy, as epitomized in the Hegelian model, remained confined to the realm of consciousness, circling endlessly within a closed idealist space in which reality appeared only as a reflection of the unfolding of “Spirit.” In this view, the human being is not a free agent, but a mere moment in the development of an abstract Idea that manifests through him only to be negated. Philosophy, in this sense, became a late metaphysics, attempting to understand history as a rational process while ignoring the material basis that produces consciousness itself: labor, production, need, exchange, and conflict.
Marx saw this mode of thought as a concealment of reality behind the mirrors of consciousness, a postponement of action behind the archives of understanding. Therefore, his break with speculative philosophy was a necessary condition for the birth of a new kind of thinking—one that does not begin with consciousness, but with life itself: with its material conditions, its relations of production, and with history as a field of struggle, not a narrative of the manifestations of reason.
This foundational rupture is clearly articulated in the Theses on Feuerbach, particularly in the famous statement:
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
With this sentence, Marx declares the end of philosophy as it was known in modernity, and the beginning of a new philosophy—one that places human action, historical practice, and material labor at its center. Truth is no longer a concept to be discovered, but a result to be produced. Utopia is not a deferred promise, but a real project that emerges from the contradictions of the present.
Through this shift, even the very structure of knowledge is overturned: what was once understood as autonomous consciousness generating reality is now seen as a construct derived from existing material relations. What was once called “human nature” becomes a historical and transformable concept—shaped by changing relations of labor, ownership, and power.
From this framework, the central concept of Marxist philosophy emerges: praxis. Praxis does not mean individual action or ethical behavior, but collective historical action that reshapes reality through a critical awareness of its conditions—action through which the human being produces the world and himself.
This practical philosophy does not separate itself from reality, nor rise above it; it permeates its details: in labor conditions, class divisions, private property, the state, culture, and ideology. In this way, philosophy becomes a tool of critique—not merely of consciousness, but of the very system that produces it. According to Marx, philosophy becomes a weapon in the class struggle—not an expression of academic neutrality.
In this light, history is no longer understood as a linear development of ideas, but as a battlefield between conflicting social forces. Every system of knowledge, every legal structure, every moral value becomes part of that struggle, expressing class interests and reproducing forms of domination. Here, Marx’s philosophy becomes a radical critique of modern reason itself—a reason that has long mistaken itself for neutral and autonomous, while in truth it is deeply conditioned by the prevailing class order.
Thus, the break with speculative philosophy is more than a simple “shift from idea to reality”—it is a redefinition of philosophy’s role itself: from a discourse that describes the world to a tool for changing it; from a quest to establish “truth” to an inquiry into the conditions of its production. Any philosophy that does not lead to transformation becomes, in this framework, a form of ideology—a kind of false consciousness that serves the status quo.
In this sense, Marx’s rupture was not merely an epistemological break but an epistemological revolution—a reconstruction of the relationship between thought and the world, between human beings and their history, between theory and practice. In this new foundation, history is no longer an object of understanding, but a field of intervention; and the human is no longer a fixed essence, but an agent within a mutable web of relations.
From this, Marxist philosophy does not emerge as a contemplative alternative to previous philosophies, but as a radical overturning of their structure. A philosophy that seeks not reconciliation between thought and reality, but a dismantling of the power relations that produce that reconciliation. A philosophy that does not merely seek meaning, but asks: Who owns the means of meaning? Who defines reality? In whose interest is history written?
In this horizon, the practical philosophy founded by Marx is inseparable from politics, economics, and daily life. It is a thinking that engages with history not as a distant past but as an immediate field of struggle—a philosophy that sees the human not as what he is, but as what he could become.
Fourth: From Classical Political Economy to the Critique of Political Economy
It is no exaggeration to say that when Karl Marx read classical political economy, he did not approach it as one reads a technical manual, but as one reads the “mirror of the world.” In the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus, Marx saw not merely technical analyses of markets and production, but an entire ideological system expressing the spirit of capitalism—justifying its existence and concealing its contradictions under the guise of “natural laws.” For this reason, Marx did not write within political economy, but against it. He did not complete what the classical economists began; instead, he deconstructed its very foundations, exposing what appeared to be a neutral science as nothing more than an ideology of power.
In classical political economy—as exemplified by Adam Smith—the market appears as a rational entity, operating through the “invisible hand” that supposedly balances competing interests. Here, Marx begins his critique: What invisible hand produces poverty in the midst of abundance? What kind of rationality leads to the exploitation of the majority for the benefit of the few? This paradox became the starting point of his critique: classical economics speaks of production and wealth, yet remains silent on how wealth is produced and by whom.
Even David Ricardo—who acknowledged the conflict of interests among workers, capitalists, and landlords—nonetheless viewed distribution as governed by the natural laws of labor and market, without asking: Who creates these laws? Who reproduces the relations of domination within them? Marx, on the other hand, did not see the market as an automatic mechanism but as a historical outcome of specific social relations: relations of production rooted in private ownership of the means of production, and in the separation of the worker from the conditions of his labor.
From this point, Marx developed his critique of political economy, crystallized in Capital. The relationship between labor and capital is not one of equal exchange, but a historical structure of domination, masked by the logic of the market. Labor, as sold on the market, is not a mere “commodity”; it is the source of value itself—yet it is sold for less than the value it produces. This surplus—surplus value—is the cornerstone of the capitalist system and the moment of real exploitation, veiled in the rhetoric of “free exchange.”
Here, the deeply critical and philosophical nature of Marx’s project becomes evident: he does not oppose capitalism from the outside, but deconstructs it from within its own logic—revealing that what is presented as economic science is actually a discourse of power that masks class contradictions, beautifies exploitation, and reproduces the alienation of the worker from his labor and from his humanity.
Thus, Capital becomes more than a book on economics—it becomes a text in modern critical anthropology. Under capitalism, the human being is not simply a worker, but is reduced to a productive element, measured by his capacity to generate surplus value. Life itself becomes an economic function, and the human being a tool in the machinery of the market.
Marx also saw classical political economy as a kind of new theology: just as the Church in the Middle Ages justified power through divine will, modern liberal economics justifies authority through the “will of the market,” imbuing it with a natural, ahistorical character. This is where Marx famously declares:
“The ruling ideas of each age are the ideas of its ruling class.”
Political economy, therefore, is not merely a theory of reality—it is a mechanism that reproduces and justifies the reality of class relations.
Consequently, Marx does not simply offer a “new theory” of economics—he redefines economics itself as a site of struggle, not a domain of balance. He redefines the human being as a historically alienated agent, not an abstract economic entity. In this sense, Marx’s critique of political economy is not an academic contribution, but a revolutionary act of knowledge—one that disrupts disciplinary boundaries and reconnects economics to philosophy, history, politics, and the destiny of the human being.
Marx does not reject economics as a science, but he rejects the use of this “science” to conceal exploitation. He refuses to separate market laws from the social conditions that produce them. His project reconnects abstract economic concepts—such as value, labor, and price—with their historical context, with the blood shed for them, and with the workers crushed beneath them.
Thus, Capital is not a book merely to understand the market—it is a book to understand the human being in the age of the market: to understand how history becomes an equation, how life becomes a commodity, and how love, time, thought, and nature are transformed into figures in the ledger of profit accumulation.
From this perspective, Marx’s critique of political economy is also an existential-philosophical project. It does not merely demand just distribution—it calls for the humanization of economics, for re-linking it with dignity, with labor as a creative act, not as modern enslavement. It is a project that asks the human being in their core: Are we what we produce? Or what we are sold for? Do we own our tools? Or are we owned by them? And—can we break free from this captivity?
? Chapter Two: Capital as a Philosophical Critique of Modernity
Capital as a Critique of Ideology
The Marxist Concept of Labor: Human Essence and Alienation
Alienation in Labor and Production as the Core of the Capitalist Era
Capital as a Social Relation—Not Merely Money or Commodity
When Marx wrote Capital, he was not merely drafting a treatise in political economy; he was, between the lines, proclaiming a radical rupture with the very foundations of modernity: with liberal individualism, with the market as a moral and universal order, and with history as a neutral, rational process. Capital is not simply an economic text—it is, more profoundly, a critique of modern history as the history of alienation, and a critique of modern reason as instrumental reason that reifies the human and reduces social relations to material relations governed by market laws.
In this context, Capital cannot be understood apart from its deep philosophical background, stretching from Hegelian dialectics to Feuerbachian materialism, from the critique of classical political economy to critical sociology. Marx does not write as a neutral economist, but as a philosopher intent not on interpreting the world, but on changing it. Thus, Capital is not merely an attempt to understand the economic mechanisms of capitalism, but a comprehensive critique of the spirit of modernity that produced capitalism and legitimized its domination as if it were a historical inevitability.
Modernity, as understood by Marx, is not simply a technical or political transformation—it is an ontological restructuring of the world and of the human being alike. Capitalist modernity is not only the age of machines, but also the age of disenchantment, where the human is reduced to a producer and the world to objects for sale and purchase. In this world, human values become mere "commodities," human labor becomes "exchange value," and the individual becomes estranged from their product, their self, and others. In this sense, Capital is a precise analysis of the age of total alienation, where the human is no longer sovereign—but the commodity speaks, rules, and generates meaning.
What Marx offers here is not a mere moral critique of capitalism, but a philosophical deconstruction of its deep structure. He rethinks concepts like “labor,” “value,” “property,” and “freedom” not from a liberal moral standpoint, but from a materialist and historical lens that reveals how these ideals of modernity have been transformed into tools of oppression and exploitation. In this way, Marx’s project in Capital is philosophically ambitious—comparable, in scope, to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—but it moves in a radically different direction: not toward constructing a transcendental system of reason, but toward uncovering the infrastructure of the modern world as a network of social relations forcibly transformed into material objects of exchange.
In this part of his work, Marx not only deconstructs classical political economy, but offers a radical critique of the capitalist logic of production, wherein human time becomes labor-time, and human existence becomes surplus value. In this system, the individual does not produce the world as much as they are produced by it—as a function of the market. This is what makes Capital a deeply philosophical text, one that belongs to the tradition of radical critique, which seeks not reconciliation with reality, but the exposure of its hidden history.
Thus, this chapter articulates its central thesis: Capital is not merely a critique of capitalism, but a critique of modernity as the expression of capitalism—in thought, in the dominant understanding of time, knowledge, freedom, and the self. In this pursuit, Marx does not merely confront the symptoms of injustice and exploitation, but deconstructs the philosophical foundations that made these injustices appear natural—even rational and progressive.
In this spirit, the chapter will address the following points:
How Marx redefines the “commodity” as a critical entry point into understanding modern society.
How “value” becomes a hidden structure that governs the relationships between people and things.
How alienation functions as a philosophical logic that reduces the human to an economic being.
How Marx deconstructs the concept of “freedom” in modern liberalism.
How labor is transformed from an expression of the self into a form of domination.
In this light, Capital ceases to be merely an economic book, and becomes a comprehensive philosophical treatise on the critique of the modern world—revealing that the logic of the market is not external to the human self, but invades it, reshaping it according to a logic that belongs not to ethics, but to profit—not to freedom, but to necessity.
In this chapter, we do not approach Marx as an economic expert seated at a table of numbers balancing supply and demand, but as a modern philosophical critic excavating the deep structures that shape modern consciousness, digging with dialectical eyes into the layers of social time—not to measure production, but to expose the frameworks that produce the human as an alienated being. For Marx, capitalism is not merely a form of economic organization, but a metaphysical expression of a specific mode of being—one that reorganizes the relationships between people and things, and reconfigures the notion of the self through the market system, where value is not measured by life or need, but by abstract labor and generalized commodification.
Hence, Capital must be read as a profound philosophical text—one that engages Western modernity at its peak and places its moral and ontological project under radical interrogation. Marx’s critique is a critique of critique itself, a reversal of the modern self which claimed liberation, only to re-enslave itself in the form of consumption and ownership. In this sense, Capital is not merely an analysis of an economic system, but an attempt to understand the modern human—remade within a structure that exhausts their energies and reproduces their alienation as a necessary condition for the survival of the system itself.
I. Capital as a Critique of Ideology
When Marx wrote Capital, he was not merely writing within the domain of political economy, but within the very zone of conflict between truth and illusion—between material reality as shaped by the conditions of production, and the image of that reality as presented by ideology, as if it were natural, eternal, and ahistorical. Here lies one of the most vital keys to understanding Capital as a philosophical text no less significant than the works of Hegel or Kant—yet one that surpasses them in its ability to expose the infrastructure through which false consciousness is reproduced within the modern world.
In Marx’s view, ideology is not simply a set of false ideas that people hold about their reality. It is a complete system of representations produced by bourgeois society to conceal the structural class contradictions, and to render the exploitation of human by human a “natural”—even desirable—relationship. Ideology is not a direct lie; it is an “inverted truth,” a representation of the world not as it is, but as it ought to appear from the perspective of the dominant class. Capital, in this light, becomes a radical critique of this representational structure—a deconstruction of the relations of production, not as neutral economic equations, but as encoded relations of power concealed beneath a mask of neutrality.
Through his analysis of the commodity and the fetishism attached to it, Marx demonstrates how material objects (commodities) become bearers of symbolic meanings that go far beyond their functional use—hiding, behind their exchange value, deeply unequal social relations. Thus, the commodity becomes the primary ideology of capitalist society: it redefines the human not as a free being, but as an actor within a network of manufactured needs and produced desires. At this point, economics is no longer external to the human—it becomes a form of daily existence, a domain through which the self is continually reproduced as alienated from the material conditions of its existence.
Capital also reveals that ideology is not simply an “opinion” or a “position,” but a structure—composed of language, imagery, and concepts—that continually reproduces the world within the horizon of the bourgeoisie. What is crucial in Marx’s approach is that he does not critique ideology from a position outside of it; rather, he shows that ideology is itself a material product—the result of the division of labor, of private property, and of the relations of production. Ideology is not merely “false consciousness,” but the necessary consciousness for the survival of the capitalist system. The persistence of exploitation depends on it not being seen as exploitation, but rather as freedom, as choice, as a natural law.
In this framework, Marx emerges as a philosopher forging a new path in critical thought—not dismantling ideology through abstract theoretical alternatives, but demonstrating that the destruction of ideology depends on a material transformation of the economic base. That is, the critique of thought can only be completed through the transformation of the conditions of its production. This is the radical core of Marx’s thesis: that human liberation is not achieved by changing ideas, but by changing social existence.
Thus, the Marxist critique of ideology is fundamentally practical. It is a critique of society that exposes the “natural” as fabricated, and the “neutral” as a form of class bias. In this way, Capital is not merely a book of economics—it is a book of social philosophy, a study in the science of illusions, an anthropology of the alienated human being. It is, ultimately, a book about unveiling reality.
II. The Marxist Concept of Labor: The Essence of Humanity and Alienation
At the heart of Marxist theory, value does not lie in money, nor even in the commodity, but in labor—as the essence of the human being and the medium through which one realizes oneself in the world. Labor, in Marx’s philosophy, is not merely an economic activity or a social function; it is the essential dimension of human existence itself. It is the act of transforming nature, of creating the world, and of shaping the self—all at once. From this perspective, one could say that Marx’s entire project begins with redefining labor—not as a mere means of survival, but as an ontological act in which the human being manifests as a creator of meaning and producer of the world.
Marx was initially influenced by Hegel’s concept of labor as the mediation between self and world. But as with many of Hegel’s ideas, Marx inverted this idealist understanding and placed it within a material and historical framework. While Hegel viewed labor as an expression of Spirit and alienation as a necessary stage in the development of consciousness, Marx saw alienation not as an ontological fate, but as the product of distorted relations of production—a social condition that can be overcome.
In the capitalist system, labor no longer serves as a domain for human fulfillment; instead, it becomes a source of alienation. The worker does not own what they produce but creates for the benefit of another class. What they craft with their own hands becomes a foreign force that stands against them and determines their life. This is where the four forms of alienation described by Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts come into play: alienation from the product of labor, from the act of labor itself, from one’s human nature, and from other people. And the more production increases, the more alienation deepens—not the other way around.
In this way, Marx dismantles the liberal myth that portrays labor as a path to individual freedom. In reality, labor under capitalism does not liberate—it exhausts. It does not produce the self but estranges it. The worker labors in order to live, and lives only in order to labor—in a cycle of absurdity that reproduces slavery under the guise of freedom. In this context, labor—once the very essence of humanity—becomes the means through which humanity is denied. Life itself becomes an extension of the factory, a never-ending chain of production.
Yet, this conception does not lead to despair, but to critical awareness. Marx does not call for the abolition of labor, but for its liberation from alienating conditions. The goal of revolution is not merely to reverse property relations, but to reclaim labor as a free act, as creativity, as a means of living with dignity—not mere survival. Thus, the communist society in Marx’s vision is not a society of laziness, but a society of non-alienated labor, where people work not because they fear hunger, but because they find themselves in their work and realize their human potential through it.
Marx’s understanding of labor thus redefines what it means to be human. The human being is not merely a thinking creature (as in Descartes), nor merely a speaking one (as in Aristotle), but a working, producing being—one who creates both the self and the world through a dialectical historical process. Therefore, the liberation of humanity is not achieved through "freedom of thought" alone, but through freedom of labor—a freedom that does not mean escape from effort, but the ability to own the means of producing oneself and one’s history.
III. Alienation in Labor and Production as the Essence of the Capitalist Era
At the heart of Marx’s critique of capitalism lies not only a deconstruction of production relations or an analysis of surplus value, but something deeper and more perilous: the alienation of the human being—not as an incidental phenomenon or a secondary consequence of the economic system, but as a fundamental essence embedded in the core of modern capitalism. According to Marx, capitalism does not merely produce commodities; it produces alienated relations that reshape the human being, their consciousness, their relation to the world, to others, and to themselves.
Capitalism, in its essence, transforms labor from a creative human act into an imposed function, from a means of freedom into a tool of dispossession. The worker owns neither the means of production nor the products of their labor—not even the time in which they work. Time itself, once a dimension of human existence, is commodified: it is bought and sold by the minute and hour, priced like merchandise. Through this commodification of time and labor, the human being is reduced to a tool within a machine, a “function” inside a system that cares not for their essence but only for their productivity and profit.
In this context, alienation is not a metaphor, but a concrete, daily experience. The factory worker, the office employee, the farmer on land they do not own—all share in producing things that do not express who they are, that they do not own, and in which they do not find themselves. They exhaust their lives in labor that benefits others, generating wealth that is accumulated elsewhere. Thus, for Marx, alienation is not a moral error or a social dysfunction that can be corrected—it is a structural feature of capitalism.
The tragedy of this alienation reaches its peak when the human being themselves becomes a commodity—when their value is measured by their productivity, when the body becomes a tool, energy becomes capital, and emotions become assets to be invested. Not only are things alienated—the human being is alienated from themselves. And production itself becomes the very means of reproducing this alienation: every commodity carries within it relations of power, objectification, and estrangement—the stamp of wasted time, drained energy, and crushed identity.
This alienation does not stop with the working class—it extends into the symbolic and cultural structure of society. Art, religion, politics, education—all these reproduce a false consciousness that conceals exploitation, beautifies dispossession, and transforms alienation into a "human nature" that cannot be questioned. The most dangerous aspect of alienation is not the pain it causes, but how it becomes normalized, naturalized, and embedded as the silent backdrop of modern human life.
In the end, Capital is not merely a book about economics—it is a book about alienated existence under the logic of production that separates the human being from themselves. Capitalism does not only invest in markets—it invests in dreams, relationships, bodies, and the very meaning of life. Marx’s project is thus as existential as it is economic: a project to liberate the human being not just from poverty, but from alienation—an alienation that recasts life in the language of commodities, profits, and production.
In this sense, Marx’s critique of capitalism is not merely a call for economic justice—it is a call for humanity to reclaim itself, to restore labor as an act of freedom, production as a creative endeavor, and life as an experience, not a work schedule.
Alienation under capitalism, then, is not limited to the worker's separation from their product—it expands into a deep existential disconnection between the human being and their true self. Labor, which in classical philosophies—from Aristotle to Hegel—was a domain of self-realization, becomes in Marxist thought a site of self-loss. The tragedy lies not only in the sale of labor power, but in the sale of living time, in the erosion of freedom within mechanisms of production, and in the slow consumption of human essence through daily work.
Worse still, this alienation disguises itself as progress. Capitalism presents itself as a rational system that liberates the market, produces wealth, and expands human possibilities. But in truth, it creates an “inverted human being”—one who lives outside themselves, who seeks their identity in what they possess, not in who they are. The self is reduced to a consumer, identity to a brand, and desire to a market demand. Thus, freedom becomes an illusion—not because it is absent, but because it is sold as a set of choices that never touch the human core.
This is where Marx’s philosophical genius emerges: he does not simply mourn the ruins of the alienated human being—he reveals the mechanisms of alienation, its conditions of possibility, and how it is reproduced daily within the very structure of production. The worker who creates commodities simultaneously creates “the other who owns them”—the capitalist—and in doing so, reinforces the very relationship in which their life is estranged. The system does not operate solely through direct domination, but through internalization—where the worker becomes part of the very system that empties them of meaning, and may even defend it, because it offers the crumbs of meaning in place of the genuine meaning that has been stolen.
Thus, human liberation under capitalism cannot be achieved merely by improving working conditions; it requires a dismantling of the logic that turns labor into a source of alienation, rather than a space for creation. This is the essence of Marx’s vision: that transcending capitalism—not reforming it—is an existential necessity for freeing the human self from the grip of the market and from the complicity of modern values with the logic of commodification.
Alienation, then, is no longer a psychological state or a temporary social condition—it becomes a material and ideological structure that shapes human consciousness from within, to the point where the worker cannot even perceive their own dispossession except through the very logic of the market. The world is reproduced as an inverted world, and freedom is framed as the choice between multiple chains, while truth is veiled behind a dense web of economic relations and ideological symbols.
IV. Capital as a Social Relation, Not Merely Money or Commodity
One of the most profound and pivotal shifts that Marx introduced in the history of philosophical and social thought is his radical transformation of the concept of “capital” from an apparent economic entity into a hidden structure deeply embedded within human relationships. For Marx, capital is not merely accumulated money, nor simply a commodity to be traded, but a specific form of social relations that historically crystallized within the capitalist mode of production, taking on a deceptive material form that conceals its real nature from individuals.
Through the dialectical critique, Marx dismantles the superficial understanding of capital as a “thing” or “property” and reveals it as a historical relation of exploitation between classes—a relation not based on free exchange as liberal ideology would have us believe, but on the transformation of human labor into a commodity and human value into an exchangeable, measurable value. What appears in the market as an exchange between things is, in reality, an exchange between unequal social positions: between those who own the means of production and those who own nothing but their labor power.
In this context, capital appears as a dynamic social force, neither static nor neutral, feeding on human labor and reproducing relations of domination and control through mechanisms of the market and private property. This understanding transcends traditional economic views and moves us into a deeper philosophical horizon that questions the very structure of social existence: How does humanity produce the conditions of its own alienation? How do social forms transform into “things” that exert sovereign power over their creators?
Thus, it can be said that Marx’s critique not only overturned classical political economy but also challenged the metaphysical conception of social reality that separates humans from what they produce. Capital is not just an economic tool; it is the material embodiment of class relations, a symbolic system producing a specific form of consciousness and existence. Therefore, any analysis of capital cannot be complete without deconstructing its social-philosophical structure, which hides its nature beneath the guise of economic objectivity.
What is sold in the market is not only commodities but human beings and their capacity to live. What is invested is not only money but human time, meaning, and suffering. Under this system, things become vocal while people remain silent, and relations between humans are governed by the logic of profit and loss rather than by human value.
Hence, for Marx, capital is a new metaphysics of the modern world—a material metaphysics that does not rely on a transcendent existence or supreme idea but on a complex network of relations reproduced socially and historically, where needs turn into commodities, time into cost, and humans into functions. The task of philosophy is not merely to interpret these relations but to reveal them and liberate consciousness from their captivity.
Thus, Marx’s critique of capital is not a critique of economic content alone; it is a critique of the image of modern man alienated from himself and of the way capitalism empties existence of its meaning, transforming freedom into a commodity, labor into disguised slavery, and human relations into calculable exchanges expressed through numbers and transactions.
V. Commodity Fetishism and the Distortion of Reality
“Commodity Fetishism” is one of the deepest philosophical concepts formulated by Marx, extending beyond political economy into a structural critique of patterns of consciousness and perception in the modern world. In this concept, Marx does not speak merely of a simple illusion or cognitive error but of a complete epistemological structure that causes humans to see the world upside down, like through an “ideological camera” that does not show reality as it is, but as it is ideologically reproduced through the form of commodity exchange.
In the capitalist world, things do not appear in their true social essence but as independent entities, carrying their value inherently, as if “value” were a natural property of things, unrelated to the human labor that produced them. Thus, the commodity conceals its human origin and becomes what Marx calls a “speaking thing,” behaving as if it possesses its own will, authority, and magical power.
Fetishism here is not a mere metaphor but a radical critique of the transformation of social relations into relations between things. At the moment of exchange in the market, workers do not confront employers as distinct social subjects; rather, commodities confront each other: product against product, price against price, with the “living labor”—the humans who originally created these commodities—absent from the scene. This produces what can be called an “inverted reality,” where things become actors and humans are excluded from the historical narrative.
Commodity fetishism is not just a psychological or religious state, as in primitive societies, but a comprehensive rational system that produces reality and reorganizes perception and consciousness. It is the result of the logic of the market itself, where exchange value becomes the sole form of social recognition. Everything that cannot be measured or sold loses its value: emotions, imagination, free time, and non-utilitarian relationships. In this world, existence is reduced to “possession,” and individual existence is contingent on what one can buy or sell.
With the total dominance of the commodity form, humans come to see themselves only through the lens of the commodity. Even the self is put up for sale—in the labor market, on social networks, in resumes, in images and brands. This is what makes commodity fetishism a form of both cognitive and existential alienation. It not only deceives but produces a specific kind of consciousness in which the logic of the market becomes the logic of the world itself.
The danger of this mode lies in its invisibility—indeed, in its normalization; it is lived as natural reality, as if there were no alternative. Here lies the role of philosophy—as in Marx’s thought—to break the spell of the modern world and decode the illusions presenting themselves as truth. It is not merely a critique of the commodity as a product but a critique of the symbolic and social system that makes the commodity a sacred entity, granting it authority beyond its creators.
Thus, for Marx, commodity fetishism is not only a tool for understanding the economy but a key to understanding human consciousness under capitalism. It is a dark mirror in which humans see their distorted image, reduced to value, defined by what they possess rather than who they are. At its core, this is the crisis of modern man: becoming estranged from his world, his work, and his self, under a system that turns everything into a commodity—even dreams.
VI. Capital as Temporal Critique – From Living Time to Abstract Time
At the core of Marx’s critique of capital lies a profound analysis of time—not as an independent natural phenomenon but as a changing social relation reflecting structural transformations in the mode of production. Time in capitalism, as Marx reveals, is no longer merely a duration or a progressing interval in which the world advances, but has become a tool of control measured by value and profit, turning living time—the experiential, human time—into abstract quantitative time that serves the logic of capital accumulation.
Living time is the time that pulses with life, where humans act as historical agents shaping their existence and interacting with their environment in nonlinear ways, full of meaning and social connections. It is the time of experience, of diverse human activities that weave social, cultural, emotional, and existential relations. In capitalist time, however, this time is reduced to “abstract labor time,” measured by hours, efficiency, and productivity—the time that produces value and is added to capital.
Here lies Marx’s rupture with traditional conceptions of time: he exposes how capitalism subjugates time to the logic of exchange. Time is no longer owned by humans but becomes a resource bought and sold, exploited to the fullest extent. In this sense, a person’s relation to their time becomes one of alienation: they become a mere instrument for generating surplus value, a prisoner of the factory clock, and a digital shadow in the market equations.
Thus, time in capitalism becomes a driving force of the system, but this force is simultaneously one of domination and fusion, transforming humans into parts within a never-ending accumulation machine. Capital knows only acceleration, urgency, and constant pressure to invest every moment of time. Here lies the fundamental tension between human time—which requires freedom and connection to self and others—and capitalist abstract time, which strips away these particularities in favor of production and accumulation mechanisms.
Moreover, capital invents its own kind of “future time,” a time of promises and bets on continuous growth, a time of investment that plans, anticipates, and assesses risks yet unrealized. This future time is the time of speculation, debts, and bubbles, which carry within them a permanent crisis, for capital depends on an unstoppable motion, and at any moment, this time may explode into a historic crisis.
Marx’s critique of this temporal dimension is a critique of abstraction and constraint, a critique of turning human time into mere numbers and interchangeable values. It reveals how capitalism erases human history, transforming it into financial time, and imposes on individuals a lifestyle where the self is forgotten, kneeling before the clock and value.
Thus, Marx places the question of time at the center of social philosophy, highlighting it as a tool for deeper understanding of the crisis of capitalist modernity, which does not stop at economic boundaries but reshapes all dimensions of human life—from consciousness and subjectivity to social and cultural relations.
VII. Capital and Power: The Domination of Capitalist Ideology
Capital in Marx cannot be understood apart from its organic relationship with power, where economic force transforms into political and cultural authority dominating frameworks of thought and social behavior. Capital, as a dominant material force, is not merely an accumulation of wealth but becomes a pervasive ideological structure that shapes attitudes, determines choices, and constructs the world from a perspective serving the interests of the ruling class.
From this standpoint, capitalism becomes not only an economic system based on markets and exchange but a system of cultural domination that imposes the ideology of capital as an intellectual framework justifying exploitation and cloaking reality in the guise of nature and necessity. This ideology functions as a continuous repetitive machine, transforming complex social relations into mere exchanges between people and things, and concealing real class conflicts behind the illusion of the free market and individual choice.
Power in this context is not merely coercive force but symbolic, cultural, and cognitive authority that enforces a singular mode of thinking and turns the self into a tool within an invisible production system. Thus, a “false consciousness” is established that nurtures submission and buries the possibilities of rebellion and change. Capital does not rely solely on imposing force through direct violence but through shaping collective minds, directing desires, and formulating values adopted by society as a whole.
Marx shows how this ideological domination is a continuation of class struggle in its cultural and cognitive dimensions, where capitalist power is able to produce and reproduce itself not only in economic institutions but inside the mind of each individual. Hence the significance of Marx’s critique of false consciousness, which masks exploitation and alienation, turning individuals into unconscious instruments serving capital.
If capital is the material engine of this system, ideological power is the envelope that enables its survival and continuity by monopolizing the standards of truth and restricting discourse to what aligns with its interests. Thus, the domination of capital extends beyond economic ownership to encompass control over mind, consciousness, and history.
This analysis opens profound philosophical horizons for understanding how power is exercised in capitalist modernity, and how the critique of capital extends beyond material critique to include the critique of systems of knowledge and values imposed by these material conditions. Through this, Marx reformulates the concept of power to lie at the core of understanding social change and historical liberation.
VIII. The Working Class (Proletariat) and Its Role in the Critique of Capital
The working class, or the proletariat, occupies a central position in Marx’s analyses and his critical Capital, not merely as a defined social group but as a philosophical and critical concept that transcends the boundaries of traditional economics. The proletariat is not simply a functional class serving the capitalist mode of production; it is the historical agent carrying the potential for liberation from the material and spiritual domination produced by capital.
Marx sees the proletariat as the core of class struggle, a struggle that is not reducible to narrow economic interests but lies at the heart of the dialectical relationship between humans and the conditions of their existence. The proletariat embodies the ultimate alienation in labor, where a person is bought and sold as a commodity, stripped of ownership of the means of production, turning into a being alienated from itself and from its product.
This alienation is not only material but existentially profound, causing the individual to struggle with self and world, making labor lose its creative nature and become merely a means of survival within an exploitative system. From this springs Marx’s critique of the idea that capitalism offers freedom through the market and choice, as he sees such freedom as conditional and constrained by submission to capitalist production mechanisms.
Yet, the proletariat is not only a victim of this system; it is fundamentally the self capable of critiquing and transforming the system. It is the class that holds historical social power through its ability to organize itself, perceive the contradictions inherent in the system’s structure, and confront it through collective struggle.
Thus, the proletariat becomes a genuine critical instrument, not only because it suffers exploitation but because it understands the nature of this exploitation and recognizes the necessity of revolution against it. It is not merely a subject in Marx’s theory but an active historical agent bearing the possibility of human liberation from capitalist constraints.
Here emerges the deep philosophical dimension of this class, representing the turning point between alienated existence and free existence, between domination and historical rebellion. It is the dialectical space through which humanity can reconfigure itself and the history of the world by transcending the limits of the capitalist system and creating new forms of social relations.
Understanding the role of the proletariat in the critique of capital means understanding how the fundamental social relation between humans and their labor transforms from alienation to liberation and creativity—this being the essence of the Marxist project that extends from philosophical critique to political practice.
The strength of the proletariat lies in being the class without ownership of the means of production, compelled to sell its labor power to survive, thus becoming the core of the capital exploitation equation. However, this relationship is not limited to material or economic dimensions; it also encompasses the psychological and social structure of the individual who produces and consumes within an oppressive system. The proletariat, therefore, is the clearest example of the alienated human in their labor—alienated from self, from the fruits of their work, and from social relations reduced to cold exchanges.
With this alienation emerges an innate critical consciousness, as the ongoing experience of estrangement becomes an entry point for critical reflection on the existing system. The tangible pain of exploitation transforms into a political and social awareness of the capitalist system itself—one that commodifies labor and reduces humans to mere instruments. Here, proletarian class consciousness becomes a revolutionary force, pushing toward redefining the essence of humanity and its relation to the world.
Thus, the proletariat is not only a victim in a traditional class struggle but the historical actor capable of detaching from false ideologies legitimizing capitalism and opening horizons for human liberation from the dominion of capital. It is the force capable of penetrating the ideological veil of domination and exposing the illusion capitalism builds around market freedom and individual choice.
In this context, the concept of revolutionary labor emerges as a means of overcoming alienation—not only at the level of political practice but as a philosophical project for reconstructing social consciousness and transforming conditions of existence. Through its struggle, the proletariat redefines labor as a creative human act rather than a mere exploitative function, thereby reclaiming its humanity and dignity and paving the way for the transformation of society as a whole.
Therefore, in Marx’s perspective, the proletariat is not only an economic factor but the historical agent bearing the potentials of consciousness, rebellion, and radical change. This is what makes the analysis of capital necessary to understand its reality and the critique of capital its historical and human mission.
Chapter Three: The Dialectical Method in Capital
Hegelian Dialectics and Dialectical Materialism.
The Ascent from the Abstract to the Concrete: From Commodity to Social Formation.
Critique of Political Economy through Historical-Material Dialectics.
Infrastructure and Superstructure: The Relationship between Economy, Thought, and Culture.
When we enter the world of Capital, we do not simply open an economics book but step into a vast philosophical workshop that stretches from the core of Hegelian logic to the pulse of factories and the dusty roads of the proletariat. The dialectical method Marx employs is not merely a formal tool to analyze phenomena but a way of looking at the world that deconstructs reality—not as a collection of static data, but as a network of tensions, conflicts, and constant movements that can only be understood through their processes, contradictions, and transformations.
The Marxist dialectical method, which reaches its highest maturity in Capital, is not a reproduction of Hegelian dialectics but a radical reversal of it. While Hegel’s dialectic sought to understand the movement of the Idea and its passage through historical stages toward its total realization, Marx takes this mechanism and redirects it toward material reality: labor, production, class struggle, and the commodity. In other words, dialectics moves from the abstract to the concrete, from spirit to body, from idea to machine. This transition is not a mere technical modification but the foundation of a new philosophical horizon that sees history not as the manifestation of spirit but as a battlefield of material, economic, and social struggle.
In this chapter, we approach Capital not as a system of economic laws but as a dialectical text reflecting the tensions of the modern world itself. The commodity, in its simplest form, is not for Marx a mere unit of account or consumable value, but a philosophical knot that contains within it social relations, modes of production, and a history of domination, reification, and alienation. The dialectical method is the sole tool capable of uncovering these intertwined relations because it does not settle for describing things as they appear but digs into their layers and views them through the logic of transformation and contradiction.
Marxian dialectics, as it appears in Capital, is not a description of the world but a struggle with it. It takes contradiction not as a flaw in reality but as its driving force. The relationships between the worker and capital, exchange value and use value, supply and demand, production and consumption, are not harmonious relations but arenas of conflict, and can only be understood by placing them within a historical process where contradiction moves, not as a contingent event but as a fundamental law.
At the heart of this method lies “dialectical materialism,” not as a revised version of Hegel but as a revolution against contemplative philosophy. Marx does not write from outside the world but from within it; he does not theorize from an ivory tower but engages reality as a historical agent. Dialectics, in this context, is not merely used to understand things but to change them, to transform consciousness from static contemplation to critical action, and from philosophical critique to historical practice.
Thus, Capital becomes a profoundly philosophical text—not because it uses abstract concepts, but because it redefines philosophy itself: extending it into social struggle, making it a tool to reveal the hidden structure of the world, and an attempt to understand how power, exploitation, and false consciousness are reproduced through everyday, seemingly innocent relations like buying and selling, working hours, or wage determination.
Hence, this chapter does not merely seek to explain Marx’s dialectical method but to trace its pulse within the text, to reveal how dialectics functions inside Capital as a critical machine that deconstructs surfaces to uncover structure and shows how every economic number is, in reality, compressed history and concealed conflict.
Ultimately, understanding the dialectical method in Capital is not a purely philosophical exercise but an entry into the deep structure of Marx’s critical mind, the key to grasping the intellectual and political backbone of Marx’s project. Dialectics here is not used as a decorative analytical tool but reconfigured as a comprehensive strategy to understand and transform the world. It is not an attempt to explain how things work but to reveal why they work this way, for whose benefit, and at what human cost. The social reality capitalism describes is not innocent or neutral but a historical product made of contradictions, tensions, and conflicts that can only be understood by grasping its internal dialectical logic.
Dialectics for Marx, as manifested in Capital, is not only an epistemic compass but also a philosophical weapon directed against the forces of stasis and reification, and against forms that make exploitation appear as “natural law.” Thus, dialectical analysis strips away the “objectivity” veneer from phenomena to expose their ideological character and show how market laws, which seem neutral, are in fact manifestations of class power carefully disguised. Therefore, the dialectical method does not reveal the world as it is but as it hides itself.
In this framework, Capital becomes a philosophical book—not in the academic scholastic sense but as a radical project redefining what philosophy itself means: from isolated mental practice to a historical tool of deconstruction and construction. Dialectics here does not reflect the world but overturns it; it does not describe but intervenes. It rejects neutrality and makes thought an action, criticism a stance, and understanding the beginning of change.
Marx, through the dialectical method, does not write as a detached theorist explaining the world from outside but as an actor immersed in the flesh of reality, probing its contradictions, digging through its layers, and interrogating its apparent silence. Dialectics is Marx’s eye that sees the unseen and his ear that listens to what is hidden beneath the market’s noise. It is also his way out of contemplative philosophy’s captivity into a historical-materialist, militant philosophy that deals with humans not as transcendent selves but as alienated beings producing their existence in constant conflict with forces of domination.
Thus, the dialectical method in Capital is not reduced to a theoretical struggle between ideas but a historical struggle between classes, and Marx’s attempt to make philosophy a tool for revelation and confrontation, not reconciliation. Dialectics does not just show that reality changes but that this change is not inevitable—it is open to conscious human intervention. This makes dialectics, in its Marxist form, a philosophy of revolution par excellence: a revolution against stagnant thought, economic systems, alienation, and human reification.
In this profound sense, one can say that dialectics is not only Marx’s logic but the pulse of the world he shapes in his language; it is the class-conscious eye that sees contradiction in every so-called “natural” phenomenon and reveals that what appears inevitable is in fact conditioned, constructed, and open to possibility. Ultimately, it is Marx’s language of rebellion against all that is said to be eternal and unquestionable.
Dialectics, then, is revolution formulated as method, critique as logic, and history written from the standpoint of those who have nothing but their bodies and consciousness. Reading dialectics in Capital is not just an exercise in understanding a book but an entry into a liberatory adventure that makes thought historical practice and theory a promise of change.
In this horizon, dialectics in Capital becomes a living space where thought interacts with history, the abstract with the concrete, conflict with meaning. Marx does not write about the world as a static object but about a reality that moves, struggles, and forms through modes of production and contradictory social relations. Marxist dialectics goes beyond interpretation to deconstruct the mechanisms of domination embedded in everyday life: in a commodity displayed, in time sold, in a body consumed, in a consciousness shaped without seeing itself. Hence dialectics is not an external analytical method but extracted from the heart of the phenomenon itself, from its internal logic speaking through contradictions.
Here, labor, for example, is not mere economic activity but a field of dialectical tension between humans as producing selves and the forces of production that alienate them. The commodity, seemingly innocent and familiar, becomes a complex knot of frozen social relations embedded in things. This ability to make the familiar strange and the ordinary questionable gives Marxist dialectics its revolutionary philosophical power. Every analysis in Capital starts from the ordinary but ends only by exposing the invisible structure producing it, digging to the roots to see whether the world is as it seems or as it is portrayed to us.
In this sense, dialectics in Capital is what makes philosophy a critical practice that tolerates no obvious truths and submits to no mere appearances. It is reason when it rebels against its own forms.
1. Hegelian Dialectics and Dialectical Materialism
At first glance, it seems that when Marx speaks of dialectics, he is merely speaking in Hegel’s language. However, in truth, he turns this very language against its original content. Hegel presented dialectics as a method for understanding the development of thought, spirit, and history, but Marx wrested dialectics from its idealist palace and placed it within the factory of labor, in the movement of production, in class contradictions, and in relations among humans—not relations of ideas. What was for Hegel the becoming of consciousness became for Marx the movement of matter. What was for Hegel the drama of the absolute mind’s self-realization became for Marx a historical struggle steeped in blood, sweat, and alienation.
Hegel saw dialectics as a progression from self to object, and from object to the absolute, where contradictions are reconciled in a higher rational unity. Marx, however, carried out what can be called a silent “epistemological revolution” by declaring that dialectics is not the movement of consciousness but the movement of reality itself. Matter does not reflect the idea; rather, it produces the idea. Thought is not a mirror of an elevated spirit but the product of historical material relations that move, contradict themselves, and generate illusions about themselves.
Herein lies the essence of dialectical materialism: matter is not merely “things,” but a dynamic process that changes and transforms, whose core is internal contradictions. Labor, for example, cannot be understood as a mechanical production process but as a dialectical relationship between humans and nature, between workers and the means of production, between material value and social value. Marxist dialectics does not seek to reconcile opposites as in Hegel; it views contradiction as the fundamental driver of history, and that true transcendence can only come through struggle, not reconciliation.
Marx brought dialectics “down to earth” and likewise returned philosophy to its true material field: human life, their labor, struggles, and social systems. Thus, Hegelian dialectics was transformed by Marx into a historical material dialectics that moves not in the heavens of meanings but in the flesh of reality. If Hegel said history is the stage where spirit manifests itself, Marx replied that history is the stage of class struggle, and that every spiritual, legal, or cultural development grows upon a specific economic and social base.
Dialectical materialism is therefore not merely a “correction” of Hegelianism but its radical core. It is what gives Capital its revolutionary nature—not as a book on political economy but as a philosophical text exposing how the capitalist system functions through its structure of contradictions rather than its slogans. From the contradiction between capital and labor, from the tense relation between value and use, and from the division between productive labor and accumulated profit emerges what can be called the “internal logic of capitalism,” which is only understood through the lens of material dialectics.
While dialectics for Hegel culminates in the “reconciliation of the self with the world,” for Marx dialectics knows no reconciliation but ends in revolution. Revolution is not merely a momentary explosion of anger but a dialectical transformation of the structure of reality, social relations, and the production of meaning. Thus, Marxian dialectics becomes on one hand an epistemological tool and on the other a liberatory tool. It does not aim to understand the world as it is but to reveal what it conceals and what it can become.
2. The Ascent from the Abstract to the Concrete: From the Commodity to the Social Formation
In the dialectical method Marx employs in Capital, thought does not begin from reality as it appears on the surface, but rather from the most abstract concepts, gradually descending toward the complexity of concrete reality. This does not mean that Marx starts from mere mental abstractions like metaphysicians; rather, he reconstructs the concrete through an ascending journey from the abstract. In other words, he rebuilds reality not as it is seen, but as it is produced. He does not treat the commodity simply as an economic unit, but as a social structure laden with history and contradiction.
The commodity, in this sense, is not only a starting point but the gateway through which Marx enters the core of capitalist contradiction. It is the primary form of social relations in bourgeois society—a form that appears natural and neutral but conceals within it a dense network of alienated social relations. The commodity is not merely a thing produced for sale, but the social existence of things when human labor is reduced to exchange value, and humans themselves are reduced to producers who relate to other people through things.
In this ascent from the abstract to the concrete, the mechanism of capitalism’s operation is revealed: how things are produced as values, humans hidden as relations, and contradictions masked by the language of the market, supply, and demand. This is what Marx calls "fetishism"—the reification of social relations so that they appear as relations between things. Here, philosophical critique becomes necessary not to understand the commodity as a "thing," but as a symbolic structure that conceals from people’s consciousness the reality of their social relations.
As the analysis deepens, Marx moves from the commodity to money, then to capital, then surplus value, then production and accumulation, culminating in the structure of the entire class society. Thus, the methodological trajectory in Capital follows the law of "the ascent from the abstract to the concrete," that is, the movement from the most abstract form—the commodity—to the social formation as the concrete structure of those abstractions, which manifests in institutions, laws, the state, and ideology.
Here, "the concrete" does not mean what is perceived by the senses, but the complex whole that cannot be grasped directly and must be constructed through dialectical analysis. Capitalist society is not understood by simply collecting isolated phenomena, but by understanding the internal relations that produce those phenomena. This is the difference between the empirical method—which suffices to describe phenomena—and the dialectical method—which reconstructs reality in thought through its movement and contradictions.
The concrete, then, is the result of dialectical thinking on the abstract, not its opposite. This is the essential difference between Hegelian dialectics and Marxist dialectics: the former begins with spirit to reach reality, while the latter begins with the abstract form of reality—the commodity—to reconstruct the social relations that produce it. Hence, Capital is not merely a deconstruction of capitalist reality, but an attempt to build it theoretically in a way that reveals its contradictions and unmasks its mechanisms.
In this way, the ascent from the abstract to the concrete becomes not only an analytical technique but a comprehensive philosophical journey, starting from the simplest abstract forms—such as the commodity or exchange value—to reconstruct the social world we live in, not as a given appearance but as a set of historically intertwined, changing relations grounded in contradiction. This cognitive journey is not an escape into abstraction, but a return to reality from a higher vantage point—one that reveals how this reality produces itself, conceals its mechanisms, and imposes its own logic on individuals who believe they are free in their choices.
In Marx’s dialectical method, the abstract does not mean separation from reality but is the tool for revealing its deep structure. Beginning with the commodity, for example, is not arbitrary, but because it is the simplest form in the capitalist structure—the form that contains within it the major contradictions that will grow and erupt at higher levels of analysis. The commodity conceals social relations behind the mask of things; it turns relations between humans into relations between things, saturating everyday life with the illusion of neutrality and false authority of “objectivity.” But what appears neutral is in fact the production of power relations exercised through market, labor, and law.
Thus, the ascent from the abstract to the concrete also means the ascent from veils to essence, from false consciousness to ideological critique, from superficial similarity to structural contradiction. The capitalist world is not founded on logic of coherence but on the logic of contradiction: between labor and capital, use value and exchange value, wages and surplus value, human time and economic time. These contradictions are not understood by description alone but by dialectically reconstructing them, showing them not as exceptions but as the general rule governing the entire structure.
Hence, the concrete as Marx understands it is not given directly in experience but is constructed through dialectical thought and through dismantling illusions that make this reality appear natural and fixed. Reality is not “what exists,” but what produces itself daily through material conditions and social relations subject to change. Therefore, the goal of this cognitive ascent is not limited to understanding but transcends it toward possibility: the possibility of change, revolution, and producing a new reality free from alienation and exploitation.
In this framework, philosophy ceases to be mere contemplation and becomes a weapon. The abstract, once the end of metaphysical reflections, turns into a starting point for analyzing the material world and its contradictions. Thus, philosophy becomes a tool in the hands of the class that owns nothing but is capable of overturning the world. The abstract—when understood dialectically—does not remain a floating idea but becomes a necessary moment in building revolutionary consciousness.
In this sense, Marxism does not reject the abstract but restores its revolutionary function. It redefines knowledge not as a description of the world but as intervention in it; not as a mirror but as a hammer. Therefore, every step in the analysis of Capital is not only a step toward intellectual complexity but toward political revelation. Every concept—from commodity to value, to capital—carries within it a project of dismantling, a project to blow up the structure that produces and reproduces alienation in the name of “nature” or “necessity.”
The abstract, then, is the gateway to the heart of contradiction, and the concrete is the reconstruction of the complex whole based on that contradiction. Thus, dialectical analysis becomes a dual process: on one hand reconstructing reality in thought, and on the other paving the way for reshaping reality itself through revolutionary practice. Here theory and practice unite in a single moment: the moment of dialectical consciousness that does not settle for explaining the world but strives to transcend it.
3. Critique of Political Economy through Historical Materialist Dialectics
At the heart of Capital, we find not only an analysis of economic mechanisms but something deeper: a radical attempt to reformulate political economy itself on new philosophical foundations derived from the historical-materialist dialectical method. This method does not settle for describing economic phenomena as fixed givens; rather, it treats them as historical products arising from a contradictory and evolving social process. Hence, Marx’s critique of political economy is not merely technical or reformist but a fundamental critique of the entire epistemic structure upon which this science was founded since its inception with Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
Marx begins with a basic premise: classical political economy treats concepts such as “labor,” “value,” “profit,” and “capital” as natural, eternal categories applicable at all times and places. However, the historical-materialist method overturns this perspective by showing that these concepts are historically specific social forms that emerged under particular conditions and may disappear with the disappearance of those conditions. Value, for example, is not a natural property inherent in a thing but an expression of a social relation between producers, taking material and illusory form in the commodity. Thus, the study of economy transforms from studying eternal laws to unraveling the history of social relations manifested through these laws.
The historical-materialist method, in this sense, does not seek constants but contradictions; not an ideal system but the conflicts produced by the very structure of production. Each stage of human history is read through dominant relations of production and the persistent tension between the forces of production (technology, knowledge, labor) and the relations of production (ownership, control, distribution). When the forces of production expand to the point that the relations of production become an obstacle to them, a crisis arises, and class conflict erupts, which in turn becomes the motor of historical change.
Thus, political economy becomes a field of conflict rather than equilibrium, subject to transformation rather than repetition. Capitalism, despite its claims of rationality and “naturalness,” is only a transient moment in a long history of modes of production. Indeed, in Marx’s view, it is a system that produces its own contradictions: it creates enormous surplus wealth, while simultaneously generating poverty and deprivation; it expands markets but destroys communities; it increases productivity yet alienates humans. These contradictions are not flaws in the system but its fundamental conditions.
The historical-materialist dialectical method thus returns political economy to its philosophical roots: not as a neutral science but as a reflection of power and domination relations. For Marx, Capital is not merely an analysis of a mode of production but a critique of the consciousness that produced this mode and legitimized its continuation. Capitalism rests not only on economic structures but on the ideology that renders its economy an inevitable fate. Hence, the critique of political economy is simultaneously a critique of society, culture, and the ideology underpinning them.
The importance of this dialectical critique lies not only in deconstruction but in outlining a horizon for transformation. It shows that history is not a closed circle but a sequence of ruptures and transformations that can open to new possibilities. With every analysis of economic relations, Marx plants a political and ethical question: Who owns? Who is exploited? Who makes history? Thus, Capital becomes a revolutionary philosophical project, not studying the world as it is but as it could be.
4. Infrastructure and Superstructure: The Relationship Between Economy, Thought, and Culture
When we enter the core of the Marxist worldview, we confront a fundamental division that forms one of the pillars of Marx’s historical and social understanding: the infrastructure (base) and the superstructure. This division is not only a product of philosophical abstraction but also serves as an analytical tool to comprehend the entire social fabric, including economy, politics, culture, religion, art, and law. In Marx’s dialectical conception of history, thought and culture are not autonomous spheres governing themselves independently; rather, they are conditioned reflections of deeper material and economic conditions that set the overall rhythm of human consciousness.
From this perspective, the infrastructure—composed of the forces of production (tools, technology, human skills) and relations of production (ownership, labor, classes)—constitutes the material foundation from which everything above it emerges: political institutions, legal systems, ideology, religion, philosophy, art—that is, the entire superstructure. This relationship is not a mechanical cause-and-effect but dialectical: the infrastructure does not directly “cause” the superstructure but produces the material conditions that delimit the range of intellectual and cultural possibilities at any given historical moment.
Accordingly, thought in the Marxist view is not a free-floating force but a conditioned reflection: religious consciousness, for example, does not stem from a pure spiritual tendency but reflects human alienation from the conditions of existence in a world shaped by material forces beyond their control. Philosophy, likewise, is not produced in a vacuum; it feeds on the fissures in society and reorganizes them into theoretical forms that may either justify the existing order or prepare the ground for its revolution. Thus, the superstructure is not mere ornamentation added to the social body but an integrated symbolic apparatus that reproduces the relations of domination imposed by the infrastructure.
However, the relation between base and superstructure is not a rigid linear one. The superstructure, while conditioned by the material base, can possess relative autonomy and may become a counterforce—either to reinforce the existing order (as in dominant ideology) or to undermine it from within (as in revolutionary critique or transformative intellectual movements). At moments of profound crisis, the tension between the two structures intensifies, and the latent contradictions in society surface when the superstructure can no longer accommodate changes occurring in its economic base.
Marx famously wrote in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”
Within this framework, culture and thought can be understood not as pure products of the mind but as fields shaped in light of dominant relations of production. The feudal era produced a divine religious consciousness, while capitalism produced a legal-individual consciousness that establishes formal freedom but conceals structural exploitation. Thus, ideas are not read in isolation from the context that produced them but as instruments of struggle within the social formation.
With this understanding, all intellectual production—from arts to philosophy—becomes a terrain of undeclared class struggle: there is thought that reinforces domination (ideology) and thought that exposes it (critique). Between these two, a fierce battle revolves around meaning, consciousness, and historical direction. Hence, Marxist critique does not limit itself to analyzing industrial or economic production but extends to the production of symbols, language, myths, and cultural institutions that form the superstructural fields. It is a materialist reading of thought, but not a reduction of it—rather, a liberation from its illusions.
In this sense, infrastructure and superstructure in the Marxist project are not merely levels of analysis but expressions of the historical philosophy of humanity: humans do not only produce their tools but produce themselves through what they produce, reshaping their consciousness according to the conditions they live in. Therefore, human liberation is not achieved solely through changing ideas but through transforming the material conditions of existence in which thought itself is reformed into a new, freer, and more conscious form.
? Chapter Four: The Structure of Capital and the Analysis of the Commodity
The Analysis of the Commodity: Use-Value and Exchange-Value
The Theory of Surplus Value: The Essence of Exploitation in Capitalism
Abstract Labor and Concrete Labor
The Reification of Social Relations and the Transformation of Humans into Things
At the heart of the Marxist method, where economics intersects with philosophy, there is no point more symbolically and analytically dense than that of the commodity. For Marx, the commodity is not merely an economic unit or an object to be bought and sold—it is the threshold through which one enters the world of capitalism; the door that, if opened deeply, reveals the entire structure of a historical-social system saturated with contradiction, alienation, and symbolic violence. Thus, this chapter does not treat the “commodity” merely as an economic concept, but as the grand cipher through which the structure of capital may be read—not just as a book, but as a complete world of relationships and concepts.
Marx began his Capital with an analysis of the commodity not because he adopted a purely logical approach, but because the commodity is the simplest form in the world of the market, and simultaneously the most complex when viewed dialectically. It appears as an innocent, ordinary, material thing, but it contains within it a world of contradictions: between use and exchange, between material and abstract value, between living labor and dead labor, between the human and the thing. This makes the commodity a dual entity: a material form with a hidden social content.
Marxism does not regard capital merely as a financial or technical structure, but as a socio-philosophical structure that produces forms of life, modes of consciousness, and value systems. Therefore, understanding the structure of capital begins with understanding its simplest unit: the commodity. Just as physics begins with the atom, critical political economy begins with the commodity, for it represents the "first cell" from which the entire logic of capitalism unfolds. Through it, we uncover concepts such as: use-value, exchange-value, surplus value, abstract labor, concrete labor, reification, and alienation of the self.
In this context, analyzing the commodity does not stop at the borders of economics—it crosses into other domains: ethics, philosophy, anthropology, even metaphysics. The commodity restructures the relationship between the human and the world: man no longer produces to meet needs, but to exchange on the market; labor ceases to be a self-expression and becomes merely a means of survival in a system that sees the worker only as a productive force. Thus, human relationships are emptied of their humane content and recast as relationships between things. Everything becomes commodifiable: the body, time, love—even memory. This is what Marx calls "reification": the transformation of social relations into fixed, exchangeable, measurable things.
Here, Marxist philosophy intersects with a deeper question: what does it mean to be human in a system ruled by things rather than persons? How can the mind produce a system that enslaves it? And how can the human—who created capital—become alienated from it and dominated through it? These questions are not solely economic, but touch the core of human existence in the capitalist modern age. The commodity is not only something we buy—it is something we become.
Through analyzing the structure of the commodity, Marx unveils a metaphysics unique to capitalism—radically different from classical metaphysics. It is a metaphysics not based on essence, but on relation; not on stability, but on process; not on freedom, but on exchange. In this world, everything is measured by its potential for sale, and value is redefined not by meaning, but by demand. Thus, the human is transformed from an active subject into an economic function, from a historical being into a number in the equation of supply and demand.
This chapter, therefore, aims not only to "explain" the concept of the commodity, but to deconstruct its ideological structure and unveil the contradictions it conceals beneath its surface appearance. It also seeks to analyze how this concept branches into the key elements of Marxist political economy: from surplus value to capital accumulation, from class exploitation to the state as a reproduction apparatus, through to the relation between the economic base and the superstructure, and history as a battlefield of conflict.
In this sense, understanding the “commodity” is more than a lesson in economics—it is the gateway to the secret logic of capitalism, and to the deep philosophical system that governs our modern world. Behind the shiny surface of every commodity lies a history of hidden labor, silent contradictions, and unequal relations that make up what appears to be merely a “product.” Every commodity is a trace of class struggle, every exchange-value conceals an exploitative core, and every transaction hides a fabric of domination.
The aim of this chapter, then, is to reframe the commodity in light of Marx’s broader philosophical project—not as an economic analysis alone, but as a radical critique of the structure of existence in the capitalist world. Capital, for Marx, is not just an economic system—it is a new image of the alienated human being, and the commodity is the first mirror in which this human is fractured into a consumable, essence-less, and functionally replaceable entity.
In this light, the commodity becomes a meeting point between the economic structure and the symbolic structure of modernity. It is not merely a material product but a silent discourse that carries within it a particular vision of the human and the world—a vision that empties relationships of their ethical meaning and reproduces existence in the form of abstract exchange. What appears simple in the market—the act of buying and selling—conceals a complex web of social and productive relations, in which human labor is reduced to “value,” and the human self is redefined as an investable unit. In this way, the commodity is not merely an economic object—it is a mirror that reflects the alienation of humanity in the capitalist age.
1. Commodity Analysis: Use-Value and Exchange-Value
On the opening pages of Capital, Marx deliberately begins his analysis with the commodity—not because it is the simplest element of economics, but because it is the most deceptive and profound. The commodity is not merely a “thing” that is produced; it is a complex social form, saturated with historical and ideological meanings, and the most self-evident form of appearance of the capitalist system. To understand this economic–philosophical entity called the “commodity,” Marx makes a fundamental distinction between what he calls use-value and exchange-value—two sides of the same entity, yet each reflecting entirely different worlds: the world of need versus the world of the market; the world of the human versus that of capital.
? Use-Value: Human Need and Material Content
Use-value is what makes something useful—it satisfies a specific human need, whether material (like bread or shelter) or spiritual (like art or books). It is tied to the object’s physical properties and to its historical relationship with human interaction with nature. This value is not necessarily measurable or comparable because it varies across cultures, time periods, and needs.
On this side, the commodity appears close to the human being: it is production for need, and the relationship that arises here is a direct one between the individual and the thing—a relationship mediated by the senses and function. But Marx draws attention to the fact that although this form of value is historically older, it is relegated to the background under capitalism to make way for what he calls the "exchange logic"—that is, exchange-value.
? Exchange-Value: Abstraction, the Market, and Abstract Utility
If use-value is tied to utility, exchange-value is tied to the relationship between commodities in the market, where goods are compared not based on their usefulness, but on the relative amount of abstract labor they embody. Here, the commodity enters the world of abstraction and becomes exchangeable and numerically evaluable—it enters a network of symbolic economic relations governed by the laws of the market.
For example, a loaf of bread and a piece of cloth have different use-values, but in the market, they may be equal in exchange-value, meaning in the amount of abstract labor required to produce them. And here lies Marx’s great paradox: exchange-value conceals use-value and falsifies the human relationship with labor and the product.
? The Tension Between the Two Values: The Birth of Reification and Alienation
For Marx, the danger lies in this separation of the two values. Under capitalism, people do not produce to meet needs, but for the market; not for use-value, but for exchange-value. This leads to the reification of relationships: the relations between people (worker and employer, producer and consumer) become relations between things, and the human being is reduced to a function in a chain of exchange.
This is what Marx calls alienation: the worker produces something whose meaning they do not possess and which they do not consume. It is sold in the market and transformed into an abstract monetary value. Instead of being an expression of the self, labor becomes a burden that cuts the worker off from the product, from others, and from themselves. This alienation begins the moment exchange-value becomes detached from use-value—the moment the commodity becomes capital.
? The Commodity as Equation: A Dual-Form Object
Marx sees the commodity as a dual-form entity:
On the one hand, it has use-value: it satisfies a need and has sensory material properties.
On the other hand, it has exchange-value: it expresses an abstract quantitative relationship, based on human labor that is measurable and general.
This duality conceals a deep philosophical conflict: What determines the value of a thing? Human need or the market? Intrinsic properties or external relations? The human being or the system?
In this conflict, exchange-value dominates and sidelines use-value, making capitalism—at its core—a system for producing abstract value, not for fulfilling human needs. The capitalist does not care what is produced, only what can be turned into money. Commodities are not designed to meet a particular need, but to be sold. The human being is not valued as a living being but as “human capital.”
? When Life Itself Becomes a Commodity
In this context, the distinction between use-value and exchange-value does not remain confined to the realm of economics—it extends to all aspects of life: time is sold, the body is commodified, love becomes an investment, and even memory is packaged as a product. Humanity itself becomes merchandise, and meaning is redefined according to what is exchangeable on the market.
Marx’s analysis of this tension between the two values is a decisive philosophical moment, as it exposes the falsehood of capitalist realism and redirects attention to what has been forgotten: the human as an end, not a means. The commodity, in this sense, does not only tell us how the economy works—it tells us how the human being is reshaped under the capitalist system.
Through this distinction, the central paradox of capitalism becomes clear: what appears simple and natural—the commodity—actually conceals a complex mechanism of reduction and abstraction. When value is reduced to what can be exchanged, rather than to what satisfies needs, life becomes detached from its human meaning, and the world is reordered according to a logic that recognizes only what can be measured and sold. In this way, the relationship between human beings and things becomes distorted: people become subordinate to commodities rather than directing them. The market becomes not merely a space of exchange but a power—one that reproduces values, standards, and even consciousness itself.
2. The Theory of Surplus Value: The Essence of Exploitation in Capitalism
If the commodity is the cell of the capitalist body, then surplus value is its circulating blood, its hidden spirit. Here, Marx delves deep into the productive process—not to analyze market balances or prices, but to deconstruct the nature of capitalist profit, and to show that what appears to be a natural result of investment and risk is in fact a disguised form of organized exploitation.
In classical political economy, from Adam Smith to David Ricardo, value is assumed to be produced by labor, and profit is seen simply as a reward for risk-taking or invested capital. Marx turns this understanding upside down by posing a radical question: Where does profit come from if all commodities are exchanged at their value? If every commodity is sold for an amount equal to the labor that produced it, then where does the surplus in the hands of the capitalist come from? From this question emerges the theory of surplus value.
? Labor: The Sole Source of Value
In Marx’s analysis, human abstract labor is the only true source of value. Commodities differ in value based on the amount of socially necessary labor time required to produce them. This means that all products, regardless of their nature, can be measured by the labor embodied in them. But what distinguishes the capitalist system is that it does not only trade in commodities—it also trades in labor power itself, i.e., the human capacity to produce value.
Labor power—the human energy capable of producing—is sold on the market like any commodity. Yet it is a unique commodity, because it is the only one that can produce more value than it costs. The capitalist pays the worker a wage equivalent to what is needed to keep them alive (i.e., the value of their basic subsistence), but in return obtains several more hours of labor than that wage would "buy."
? The Moment of Exploitation: When Is Surplus Created?
Here the paradox appears: If a worker needs only 4 hours of labor a day to produce goods equivalent to their wage (i.e., to survive), the capitalist forces them to work 8 or 10 hours. The difference between what the worker needs to live and what they actually produce is what Marx calls surplus value. It is unpaid value, extracted from the worker and accumulated by the capitalist.
In this sense, profit is not a reward, but a form of legalized theft. Exploitation does not occur in the marketplace through cheating, but within the production process itself, under what appears to be a "voluntary" contract. Yet this voluntariness is deceptive: the worker owns nothing but their labor power and lacks the means of production, so they are compelled to submit to the logic of the market.
? Forms of Surplus Value: Absolute and Relative
Marx distinguishes between absolute and relative surplus value:
Absolute surplus value is generated by extending the working day without increasing wages—i.e., the worker works more, but is not compensated for the extra time.
Relative surplus value is created by increasing productivity—using technology or organizing labor more efficiently so that the worker produces more in the same amount of time, reducing the time needed to produce the wage and increasing the "free labor" handed to the capitalist.
In both cases, the goal is the same: widening the gap between what the worker is paid and what their labor produces—i.e., increasing what is taken without return.
? Alienation and the Reification of Labor
Surplus value is not just economic exploitation—it is also a deep transformation in the human relation to labor and to the self. Labor, instead of being an expression of selfhood or a fulfillment of being, becomes a source of pain and objectification. The worker does not own what they produce, has no control over their time, nor the conditions of their work. This is what Marx calls alienation: when the human becomes a mere function in a machine, producing what they do not consume and consuming what they do not produce.
Surplus value is the economic manifestation of this alienation: the moment when the human is turned into a tool of production, rather than a free subject. Profit, then, is not a sign of success, but a measure of exploitation’s depth.
? Capital Accumulation: When Surplus Becomes Power
Surplus value is what allows capitalists to expand production—to buy more machinery, to hire more workers, to increase their control over the entire productive process. It is not just stored as wealth—it is converted into power: control over labor, time, and technology. Thus, capital accumulation is not just the accumulation of wealth, but the accumulation of class power, which continually reproduces the unequal relation between capitalist and worker, but on larger and more abstract scales.
? Ideological Critique: Hiding Surplus Value
Capitalism does not show this exploitation—it hides it through ideology. Wages are presented as fair compensation, contracts are signed under the illusion of freedom, and profit is portrayed as a result of efficiency. But Marx exposes this symbolic edifice: what is presented as economic neutrality is, in its essence, soft and continuous violence—a violence not imposed through iron and fire, but through the logic of the market and the rationality of profit.
In every transaction, and every minute a worker is underpaid for their labor, this fundamental inequality is reproduced: surplus value is created and accumulated, not to be distributed, but to reinforce capital’s dominance over life.
Conclusion: Surplus Value as a Historical Expression
Marx’s theory of surplus value is not just a technical explanation of how profit arises in capitalism, as some superficial readers imagine—it is a comprehensive interpretive structure that uncovers the underlying nature of economics as a historical relation of power, not a neutral system of exchange or distribution. It is an attempt to grasp the hidden truth behind the apparent neutrality of classical economic language, to break through the market’s surface and reveal the social structure that produces profit as hidden violence, and labor as foundational alienation.
Surplus value, in this sense, is not merely the difference between what a worker produces and what they are paid—it is the very essence of capitalism as an unequal social relation. It is the condensed expression of how authentic human activity—labor—is turned into a domain of domination, and how human time is converted into profitable energy for the benefit of the class that owns the means of production. It reveals how the human being, not as a free subject, but as labor power, becomes the axis around which the entire economic cycle turns.
In Marx’s analysis, capitalism is no longer just an economic system, but an entire historical era—a time structured by the reduction of the human to a tool, and by the investment of life itself into an infinite process of accumulation. Surplus value is the index of this era, its cipher: through it, we understand how inequality is created, how classes are reproduced, and how value shifts from being a measure of need to a tool of domination.
Capitalism, in this view, accumulates not only wealth, but also power, alienation, and the inability to truly live. Every unit of surplus value represents not just unpaid labor minutes, but moments of human energy expropriated, of selfhood drained, of life extracted from the individual body and transformed into a numerical unit in the equations of production.
Read through the lens of the dialectical–historical method, this theory also reveals that surplus value is not an eternal given, but a historical construct that can be dismantled. Just as it was formed through material conditions and class struggles, it can disappear when labor and social relations are reorganized on the basis of justice, freedom, and equality. This is what makes the critique of surplus value not just a diagnosis—but a project of liberation.
In this light, surplus value becomes the other name for the gap between what a human being can be, and what they are allowed to be under capitalism; the gap between life as creativity, and life as instrument; between labor as self-expression, and labor as estrangement. It is not just an economic calculation—but an ontological struggle over the meaning of the human being itself.
Hence, the theory of surplus value is, in its depth, not just a chapter in economics, but a central moment in the critique of modernity itself. It is a confrontation with the system that transformed freedom into consumer choice, labor into a profit machine, and the human into a number in an equation that does not look at their face, but at their utility. And this is what makes Capital not merely an economic treatise, but a philosophical-revolutionary text that exposes the world—not to explain it, but to open a path beyond it.
3. Abstract Labor and Concrete Labor
If Marx saw the commodity as the nucleus in which the contradictions of capitalism are concentrated, then labor is the key that unlocks these contradictions. But labor, as understood by Marx, is not simply human activity aimed at producing useful things—it is a dual structure: it carries both a concrete, material dimension and an abstract, quantitative one. It oscillates between sensory presence in the world and quantitative reduction within the system of exchange.
I. Concrete Labor as Sensory and Historical Creation
Concrete labor is what the worker actually performs in reality: a sensory–bodily–intellectual activity, utilizing tools, experience, and time to produce something that fulfills a human need. In this dimension, labor is not just an economic activity—it is an expression of human creative energy, of one's relationship with nature, with others, and with the self. Labor here is the medium through which the human shapes the world—and in doing so, shapes themselves.
In concrete labor, we can feel effort, sweat, skill, history, and even beauty. It bears the imprint of the individual—their culture, consciousness, and personality. It is what allows the craftsman to create, the artist to sculpt, the farmer to cultivate. It is a deeply human act, rooted in matter, history, and need.
But in the capitalist system, this dimension is seen only as the outer shell, quickly reduced and subordinated to a more abstract, dehumanized dimension: abstract labor.
II. Abstract Labor as the Reduction of the Self to Measurable Time
Abstract labor, in contrast to concrete labor, is what all forms of labor have in common, regardless of their specific nature, goal, or content. It is not labor as experienced, but labor as measured, calculated, and sold. It corresponds to the socially necessary labor time required to produce a given commodity—that is, the amount of time a (generic) worker spends producing a standard product under "normal" conditions of skill and efficiency.
In this sense, abstract labor negates the uniqueness of the human in the labor process. Who the worker is, their identity, or how they carry out their task becomes irrelevant. All that matters is the abstract time spent producing something exchangeable. Thus, labor is reduced to a unit of time that can be aggregated, bought, and sold, stripped of its human context and absorbed into the logic of the market.
III. From the Creative Human to the Abstract Human
This shift from concrete to abstract labor is not merely a conceptual difference—it marks a moment of dehumanization. In this transformation, the person who labors ceases to be the central subject of production and becomes instead a carrier of labor-power, measurable by time and exchangeable for money.
In other words, capitalism does not buy the person, it buys the time that the person carries in their body. It doesn’t buy the farmer, but the hours the farmer can plow a field. It doesn’t buy the thinker, but the period during which they can produce something saleable. In this way, the human is reduced to time, to a mere function in a machine of production that cares not about who operates it, but only about the surplus value it outputs.
IV. Abstraction as a Mechanism of Power
This abstraction is not just a technical or accounting device—it is a deep ideological mechanism. It hides inequality, equates unequal labors, and lends the illusion of fairness and neutrality to the market. The baker, the laborer, the engineer, the technician—all are, in the eyes of the market, stripped of their individuality, reduced to equal quantities of saleable time.
Yet behind this apparent equality, lie vast power relations: some sell their time in order to live, others buy the time of others to accumulate profit. Thus, abstract labor becomes a tool of domination, organizing life not according to human need, but according to the logic of value extraction.
V. The Concrete Is Born from the Abstract
Still, the relationship between abstract and concrete labor is not one of absolute separation—but a dialectical one. Concrete labor produces use-values, but its worth is determined by the amount of abstract labor it contains. In other words, everything tangible that we produce or consume does not derive its value solely from its utility, but from the abstract time embedded within it—time that can be measured, compared, and exchanged.
This is what makes capitalism a qualitatively distinct historical time: a time that organizes life through labor, but only recognizes labor insofar as it can be measured and abstracted.
Thus, the distinction between concrete and abstract labor is not a minor theoretical point in Marx’s analysis, but a key to understanding the core mechanism of capitalism. The moment in which the human is separated from their labor, and labor becomes a quantifiable commodity, marks the beginning of alienation—not just as a psychological state, but as a material-historical reality experienced by the working classes. Under capitalism, humans do not produce to express themselves, but to enter a system that does not recognize their effort, only the value of what they produce—not their humanity, but their output.
This separation between labor as a vital act and its abstract result measured in the market leads to a central paradox of capitalism: the human being puts themselves into what they produce, but no longer owns it—it is sold and exchanged in a system that sees them only as a factor of production. In this way, labor is transformed from a means of self-expression into a tool for reproducing alienation. Abstract labor, by being generalized and stripped of particularity, reconfigures all social relations under the logic of the market—a logic that leaves no room for uniqueness, only for efficiency, profit, and time as a commodity.
4. Reification of Social Relations and the Transformation of Humans into Things
A Marxist Critique of the Root of Capitalist Alienation
At the heart of Marx’s critical project lies a profound analysis of reification—a phenomenon that is not merely a material process but a philosophical and social transformation by which human beings and their relationships are turned into things that can be bought and sold. In this transformation, individuality and subjectivity are stripped away, and people become commodities among other commodities in the marketplace.
I. Reification as a Natural Product of Capitalism
According to Marx, capitalism is not only an economic system based on the production and exchange of commodities, but a totalizing system that imposes the logic of thingness on everything it touches: objects, ideas, and even human relationships. Under this logic, relations between people no longer appear as direct, subjective interactions, but instead become objectified relations between things. The social value of a person is judged not by their humanity, consciousness, or history, but by what they produce or consume.
II. The Human as Thing – The "Commodity of Labor Power"
In this process, the human being becomes alienated from themselves and turns into a thing—a commodity to be bought and sold on the labor market. Specifically, it is their labor power that becomes the object of exchange. The worker, in the capitalist system, is no longer regarded as a person, but as a carrier of quantifiable, exchangeable labor time. Their relationship to capital becomes a purely reified one.
This reification extends far beyond the market itself—it permeates all dimensions of social life, where human relations are increasingly organized by market values. The human being is reduced to a "thing" among things, a "resource" whose value must be optimized in service of profit maximization.
III. Reification as a Historical and Social Process
Reification is not a natural or eternal phenomenon. It is the result of specific historical and social processes tied to the conditions of capitalist production. For Marx, reification is a symptom of alienation—of the human being’s estrangement from their labor, their product, and themselves. Yet, it is also a mutable and historically contingent condition—open to critique and transformation through the consciousness and struggle of the working class.
IV. The Impact of Reification on Social and Political Consciousness
Reification leads to a loss of awareness of one’s true human condition. It deepens the separation between individuals and weakens their ability to recognize themselves as bearers of shared interests that transcend mere economic exchange. Relationships between people are reduced to transactions between things, which paves the way for the dominance of capitalist ideology—an ideology that conceals the nature of exploitation and idolizes the market as a natural and inevitable law.
V. A Marxist Critique of Reification: Restoring Humanity and Overcoming Alienation
Marx’s analysis of reification is not a diagnosis of an unchangeable fate. Rather, it is a call for its overthrow through social revolution, a movement that restores the human being to their rightful place as a historical agent. To overcome reification is to restore human relationships to their authentic form: conscious, free, and direct—rather than mediated by commodities or abstract values.
Thus, Marx’s critique of reification becomes the cornerstone for understanding the depth of the capitalist crisis and for striving toward a society where human beings replace things, where consciousness replaces passivity, and where freedom replaces alienation.
In this sense, reification is not simply an economic mechanism tied to exchange—it is a total model that reshapes perception, consciousness, and human relationships. When the human being is reduced to a function, when their value is determined not by who they are but by what they produce, then existence itself is governed by the logic of the commodity. The worker no longer sees themselves as a free subject, but as a component in a machine moved only by numbers, profit, and loss. Social relations lose their warmth and spontaneity, becoming structured by market norms: Who earns more? Who produces more? Who is dispensable?
Reification thus infiltrates emotion, language, dreams, and even love. Nothing remains of humanity but what survives as exchangeable value—assessed, ranked, and judged.
Individuals become mere instruments for accumulation, and the world becomes a massive theater of commodity circulation, not of meaningful exchange. Even art, thought, and religion are reproduced as cultural commodities—to be bought and consumed, rather than lived as forms of free consciousness. In this sense, reification is not a byproduct of capitalism—it is its philosophical core, its beating heart, rewriting both the human being and the world in accordance with a logic that acknowledges nothing unless it can be sold.
And here lies the greatest danger: when we no longer see ourselves as subjects, but as things, marching silently in a long line of obedience and conformity.
Reification operates not only at the level of individuals and relationships—it expands to reshape the entire social structure, recoding the world according to the logic of the "universal commodity"—a logic that encompasses not only physical goods, but values, principles, and even collective imagination. Even freedom is rebranded as a marketable product: freedom of the market, freedom of consumption, freedom to choose between identical products—while true freedom is gradually withdrawn: the freedom to act historically, to change the very conditions that impose reification.
Here, Marx’s critique emerges as not merely economic, but ontological. He does not only condemn injustice—he exposes how injustice is reproduced in the very fabric of the world. Alienation becomes a mode of life, and reification a structure of feeling that we no longer sense, but inhabit. To be a "thing" is to lose the capacity to act, to be transformed from a subject of history into a number in the movement of markets.
? Chapter Five: Capital, Production – Exploitation – Accumulation
The process of capitalist production
The concept of exploitation in Marx
Capital accumulation and the reproduction of the conditions of exploitation
The economic cycle and structural collapses
When Marx addresses Capital, he does not treat it merely as a sum of money or a medium of exchange, but as a dominant social structure. He invites us to cross the superficial threshold of classical economics and descend into the depths of the modern productive system, where the true laws that move history and reproduce injustice under the guise of legitimacy reside. Capitalism, from this perspective, is not merely a form of wealth organization—it is a totalizing system of social existence, one that transforms human life into exploitable units and reorganizes the relationship between man and labor according to the logic of the market and infinite accumulation.
In this chapter, we move from the philosophical analysis of the commodity and reification to the material structure that makes such reification possible: the process of production. For Marx, production is not simply a material activity of making things; it is a historical-social act that produces human beings just as it produces goods. The worker in the capitalist's factory does not only produce cloth, iron, or bread—he also produces capital itself and reproduces, day by day, the relations of domination that subjugate him.
Here emerges one of the most radical concepts in Marxist thought: exploitation. Yet exploitation, for Marx, is not a moral insult but a precise economic equation that reveals how the worker, in the course of production, creates more value than he receives in wages. This surplus value does not return to the worker but is accumulated in the hands of the capitalist. In this way, labor itself—man's essence—becomes a source of alienation, and production becomes a double-edged space: it creates the world and dismantles the human being.
Accumulation, then, is the highest form of exploitation. It is not merely an increase in wealth, but a continuous mechanism for widening the gap of control. Every new profit is reinvested not to create balance, but to deepen control over labor and further entrench human dependence on machines and market logic. Capitalism does not simply produce poverty—it reproduces it as a condition for the perpetuation of accumulation. As Marx puts it, it "creates a reserve army of laborers," so that the permanent threat of hunger remains, and labor is imposed as a necessity rather than a freedom.
In this context, Capital is no longer a mere material or tool, but a dynamic social relation. It is not what we own, but what owns us. With each new cycle of production, this relation takes deeper root, and life itself becomes organized according to the schedule of exploitation. Man becomes subject to a logic he does not control but is subjugated by. Thus, Marx reveals not only how commodities are produced, but how the world is produced, how oppression is produced, and how human existence itself is reshaped to serve accumulation.
In this sense, Capital cannot be understood without passing through the gateway of production: production as an existential act, exploitation as the engine of history, and accumulation as the metaphysics of capitalism. These are not merely economic issues but philosophical matters that touch the essence of humanity and its relationship with the world. They place Marx’s project at the heart of a long struggle—not to understand economics, but to liberate man from its distorted conditions.
Marx’s analysis of production does not stop at describing the technical mechanisms of labor. It extends into an ontological dissection of human existence in the capitalist era. The worker is not only physically exhausted, but also emptied of meaning. His relationship with his product becomes one of alienation: he produces what he does not own and helps build a world that does not acknowledge him. This productive relationship becomes the highest form of reification: it not only separates man from his tools but alienates him from himself, from his creative essence, turning him into a “function” within a machine whose rhythm is dictated only by the logic of profit.
In this light, accumulation does not appear as an incentive for progress but as a kind of historical vertigo, in which exploitation is recycled in every production cycle and social classes are reproduced anew—so that the worker remains a worker, and the capitalist remains a capitalist—not by nature, but by structure. With each round of accumulation, the mechanisms of control and subjugation also accumulate: time is measured, effort is monitored, life is priced, and freedom is reduced to the freedom to buy and sell.
Thus, the capitalist system becomes the ultimate product of capitalism itself—a system that reproduces its own conditions and establishes its continuity through what appears natural but is, in reality, historical and subject to change. Here lies Marx’s genius: in making production not merely a field of economic analysis, but a central site for understanding how modernity produces itself, and how the human being is reshaped under its terms.
What distinguishes production in capitalism, from Marx’s viewpoint, is that it is no longer a means to satisfy needs, but a goal in itself. Things are not produced because people need them, but because the market demands them, and because profit dictates their existence. Thus, the relationship between man and the world is restructured from one of use to one of investment—value is measured not by usefulness, but by the capacity for accumulation. As such, production becomes a strange act, moving beyond human will and subjecting people to its conditions—rather than the other way around.
1. The Capitalist Production Process: The Hidden Structure of a Visible World
For Marx, the capitalist production process is not merely a technical sequence involving labor, tools, raw materials, and a final product. Rather, it is a historical-social structure conditioned by the very emergence of capitalism and laden with ideologies and hidden laws that reshape life and human relationships. When a worker enters the factory, he does not merely enter as muscular force to produce a commodity—he enters into a social relation that reproduces exploitation daily. The factory becomes the stage upon which all the contradictions of modernity are performed: between labor and capital, between human and machine, between time as life and time as profit.
Within this relationship, the worker produces nothing that truly belongs to him. Once the production process ends, he is entirely separated from his product. This expropriated ownership—where one produces something but does not own it—is not merely a legal matter; it is the very core of the capitalist system. The worker does not sell the thing he produces but temporarily sells himself: he sells his labor power, the living time of his life, in exchange for a fixed wage, which represents only the minimum required for his continued existence. The remaining value he creates does not return to him—it accrues to the capitalist, not as a personal thief, but as a representative of a system rooted in this very form of structural alienation.
Thus, the production process is not “neutral,” as classical economics claimed. It is charged with symbolic and material violence. It reorganizes time itself: the worker’s time is no longer his own—it is invested, monitored, and precisely regulated. In this sense, daily life—not just labor—becomes subject to the logic of accumulation. Time is no longer a human possession; it becomes the property of capital. In this way, capitalist production becomes a dual process: the production of commodities and the production of social relations that justify the ongoing exploitation.
At the heart of this process pulses what Marx calls surplus value—the moment in which the worker produces more than he is paid for. It is the moment when human life is transformed into a source of profit, where man is reduced from an end to a means, his body and spirit merged into the machinery of accumulation.
Understanding the capitalist production process in this way reveals that it is not only a source of wealth, but also a site of organized poverty, institutionalized injustice, and a laboratory for producing a new form of domination—more complex and hidden than the old forms based on direct coercion. Exploitation here occurs in broad daylight, but it is cloaked in the language of “freedom,” “contract,” and “voluntary labor.” Yet behind these façades lies a structural truth: the worker produces capital—but capital produces his alienation.
2. The Concept of Exploitation in Marx: From Formal Justice to Structural Violence
In Marxist thought, exploitation is not a moral insult but a structural concept at the very heart of the capitalist system. It cannot be understood through the intentions of individuals or the nature of contracts, but only within the framework of social relations that produce and reproduce the conditions of inequality and alienation. Hence, Marx posed a seismic question that shook the foundations of economic and political thought: How can an entire system be based on “freedom of labor” and yet depend on the exploitation of man? How does freedom become a hidden mechanism of control?
What distinguishes capitalist exploitation—compared to its earlier forms like slavery or feudalism—is that it is disguised and legally legitimized. The worker, on the surface, enters the labor market freely, offering his labor power in exchange for a wage. There is no direct coercion, no chains. But what is not said is that this “choice” is predetermined by the worker’s lack of ownership of the means of production. He possesses nothing but his body and his time, while the tools of life and production are monopolized by the capitalist. This so-called freedom is a freedom of necessity—man is forced to sell himself in order to stay alive.
Exploitation begins when labor power, during a working day, produces more value than it receives in wages. This excess value is what Marx calls surplus value, which constitutes the essence of capitalist exploitation. The worker may produce, for instance, in four hours what is enough to compensate his wage, but is required to work eight hours. The difference between what he produced and what he received is summed up in one word: profit. But this profit is not the result of individual brilliance or entrepreneurial risk—it is the result of the expropriation of labor time.
Here lies Marx’s major conceptual shift: exploitation is not measured by intentions but by time. The extra time extracted from the worker without compensation is the true site of exploitation. This understanding transforms exploitation from being an aberration within a just market into the very foundation and hidden structure of the market itself.
For Marx, exploitation is not a flaw within capitalism—it is its essence and driving force. Capitalism does not accumulate wealth through equal exchange, but through a fundamental disparity between what is produced and what is paid. Thus, every productive moment is a moment of both alienation and exploitation: the body is depleted, time is sold, and a system is produced that perpetuates class inequality.
Because exploitation is structural, it is also often blind and invisible. The worker does not see himself as a victim but as a "free laborer," and society does not see the capitalist as a thief, but as a "businessman." Violence slips in through the gate of law, and formal justice becomes a mask for the absence of real justice. This is what makes modern exploitation more dangerous than ancient slavery: it is disguised as freedom and saturated with the language of progress.
In a brief but profound summary, one can say that Marx’s concept of exploitation does not belong to the rhetoric of moral condemnation. It does not derive its legitimacy from sympathy or outrage but emerges from a material–dialectical analysis of the inner structure of capitalism. Marx does not describe capitalism’s brutality from the outside with moral judgment—he dissects its internal logic and shows that exploitation is not an accidental flaw in an otherwise fair system; it is the central mechanism that keeps the wheel turning. Profit is not a reward for risk—it is the temporal gap between what the worker produces and what he receives.
Marx radically redefines the concept of “justice”: not as described in statutory laws, but as it is reflected in the relational structure between classes. The formal justice celebrated by the capitalist system—freedom of contract, equality before the law, protection of private property—is nothing but an ideological cover concealing a fundamentally unequal relationship. In this light, the worker’s “freedom” is nothing but freedom from the means of survival—he is free because he owns nothing: no land, no tools of production, no means of existence. He is forced to sell his labor power under conditions he did not choose, though it appears as if he did.
This type of exploitation does not rely on direct coercion but on structural necessity. Capitalism does not need the whip—it needs the market. It does not enforce control through force, but by transforming the entire structure into a space of perpetual competition, where everyone seems free while actually being bound by historically imposed production relations.
The depth of Marx’s analysis lies in the fact that he does not see this exploitation as merely an economic issue—it is an ontological process that touches the very being of man. The worker is not only exploited in his body, but in his consciousness, his time, his imagination, and his capacity to dream of a different life. He produces a commodity he does not own and is reproduced as a being whose only option is to sell himself, day after day. Exploitation, then, is more than the appropriation of surplus value—it is the stripping away of humanity and the reshaping of man as an interchangeable function within the market network.
In this sense, Marx does not attack capitalism because it is absolutely unjust, but because it extracts justice from the core of social relations and redefines it through the logic of profit. It transforms need into market, time into wage, and man into a function. Exploitation is not an exception in this system—it is the law of its existence and continuity.
Hence, Marx’s essential question was not: Does capitalism exploit? but: How can a system that claims to uphold freedom and justice be built on a methodical form of exploitation that is neither seen nor condemned, but celebrated as economic efficiency? This sharp philosophical question is what makes Marx’s analysis of exploitation still alive after a century and a half—at the heart of contemporary debates about philosophy, politics, and justice.
3. Capital Accumulation and the Reproduction of the Conditions of Exploitation
At the heart of the capitalist logic lies not only the exploitation of the worker at the moment of production, but the dynamic of accumulation that endlessly reproduces this exploitation. Capitalism does not merely extract surplus value—it recycles it within a social structure that ensures its continuity and expansion. Here, capital accumulation is transformed from a mere economic process into a totalizing system that reshapes the world and reproduces itself historically, epistemologically, and institutionally.
According to Marx, the profit derived from surplus value is not used to meet human needs, but is reinvested to expand the scale of production, increase productivity, reduce relative wages, and intensify technical and temporal control over labor. In this sense, capital accumulates not only as money or machinery, but as a social relation—a renewed relation of power between those who own the means of production and those who own nothing but their bodies. This is where the true danger of capitalism emerges: in its capacity to make exploitation reproducible—not as direct oppression, but as the natural horizon of life itself.
Capitalist accumulation does not merely produce commodities—it produces forms of consciousness, of time, of ethics, of desire. The modern human—especially the worker—becomes a captive of a system that reshapes the very conditions of his existence according to standards of profitability and efficiency. With each new cycle of accumulation, needs are redefined, ambitions are reprogrammed, and social relations are re-engineered so that what is exploitative appears ordinary—even desirable.
From this perspective, Marx sees that accumulation does not take place only in factories, but in schools, in the media, in philosophy, in legal and religious institutions—everywhere that contributes to reinforcing the illusion of neutrality and concealing the exploitative nature of social relations. Capitalism thus becomes capable of producing its own world, its own language, its own values, and its own version of freedom—a freedom always framed by the conditions of the market.
Just as capital accumulates, so too does exploitation become entrenched. "Organized poverty" is continuously reproduced as a necessary condition for the survival of the system. The worker is not exploited once, but is reproduced as an exploitable worker through every structure of society: through education that prepares him for the market, through media that convinces him he is free, through law that binds him with a “voluntary” contract, and through consciousness that explains his poverty as a personal failure rather than a result of class structure.
Thus, accumulation becomes an ontological process—not merely an economic one. It does not accumulate wealth alone, but the very conditions of capitalist existence. It sustains exploitation not through force, but through a “second nature” that appears as the only possible reality. This is where the genius of Marxist analysis lies: not only in revealing how capital produces commodities, but in uncovering how it produces a world in which the exploitation of man appears natural, necessary, and even just.
4. The Economic Cycle and Structural Collapse: From Growth to Internal Contradiction
At the core of the capitalist logic, its strength lies not only in its capacity to accumulate, but in its specific rhythm that reorganizes social and economic time through what is known as the economic cycle. This cycle—moving through phases of recovery, growth, peak, recession, and collapse—is not a random motion or a mere market malfunction. According to Marx, it is a structural result of the internal contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production itself.
Marx does not view economic crises as accidental events or managerial failures, but as “moments of truth” that reveal the system’s essence—crisis as structure, not incident. In every cycle of accumulation, surplus value is reinvested into expanding production at a pace that outstrips the growth of the consumer market. Commodities pile up and turn into “dead capital”—goods that find no buyers—leading to contraction. Capitalism produces more than people can buy because those who produce do not earn enough to consume. This contradiction between production and consumption, between capital and labor, is what makes crises inevitable.
Thus, the economic cycle is exposed as a graph of perpetual crisis. What appears to be a system of boundless expansion is in fact a structure that swells until it bursts—only to begin again in a more brutal, more deeply accumulated, and more exploitative form. Crisis, in this view, is not a pause, but a moment of reconfiguration. It is the means by which capital reorders itself, eliminates the weak, concentrates power and wealth into fewer hands, and deepens relations of exploitation—disguised as “reforms” or “recovery.”
More importantly, Marx recognizes that crises are not merely economic; they are expressions of deeper structural breakdowns in the relationship between humans and the world. When everything is measured by profit, and when success is redefined by the logic of accumulation, the economic moment becomes a tool of ontological destruction: the destruction of meaning, social cohesion, the environment, and the human relationship to self and other. The crisis, then, is not a shortage of resources, but an excess of commodification, of market rationality, of reducing the human to a function or a number in a profit equation.
In this light, the structural breakdowns produced by the capitalist cycle—from unemployment to poverty to marginalization—are not mere side effects, but expressions of an internal contradiction between the logic of capital and the logic of life. While solutions are always offered in the language of adaptation (austerity, privatization, restructuring), Marx insists these are not solutions at all, but mechanisms for reproducing the crisis in more concealed forms.
Marx’s analysis of economic cycles is not driven by a desire to predict the moment of collapse, as conventional economists attempt, but by a deep philosophical engagement with the mechanisms of collapse themselves: how the system, from within its own logic, generates moments of rupture; how crisis moves from accident to essential feature, from anomaly to structure. Marx doesn’t read the future by market indicators—he exposes the present as a distorted horizon, where suffering is reformatted into data, control disguised as "reform," and marginalization clothed in the garb of "economic law."
Capitalism, in his view, does not collapse like a crumbling building—it feeds on its fractures. It finds in crisis the very fuel for its continuity—not as failure, but as an opportunity to intensify control, reshape conditions of production and distribution, and reinforce dominance. When it falls, it does not die; it rises again with a new face, redefining freedom, labor, and value in a way that once again conceals the violence beneath. Every collapse, then, becomes a moment of reinvention—deepening exploitation rather than dismantling it; suffocating humanity under the name of "rescue," and reshaping ruin as "structural reform."
In this vision, economics is not merely the science of wealth—it is an ideology of domination that transforms ethical and ontological questions—Who works? Who produces? Who owns? Who lives?—into cold technical equations that exclude the human from the center of analysis and replace it with the language of the market. Therefore, any discussion of “economic recovery” cannot be understood outside the context of reproducing inequality and perpetuating a logic that turns labor into modern slavery, time into productive energy, and human relationships into commercial exchanges.
Unless the fundamental questions that moved Marx from the beginning are posed again—questions about the value of labor as the essence of the human, about the logic of production as a directed historical force rather than a neutral process, about the deep meaning of freedom beyond the cage of the market—every recovery cycle is merely a temporary truce in an invisible war against humanity itself. A truce that veils the disturbing truth: that the system does not collapse because it is weak, but because it is strong enough to turn collapse into a survival tool, and disaster into a condition for accumulation.
In this sense, Marx’s understanding of crisis does not belong solely to the field of economics—it is an ontological and critical horizon for understanding the human under the age of commodification: the human who is no longer an active subject but a passive object shaped by the demands of profit, whose needs are manufactured by consumption logic, and whose self is redefined through impoverished material forms. For Marx, the moment of collapse is a moment of revelation—a stripping away of liberal cosmetics, revealing capitalism as it truly is: a machine without mercy, managing life with the same cold efficiency it manages its factories.
Chapter Six: Capital and Historical Time
Capital as a moment in the history of alienation.
From primitive communism to capitalism: the path of reification.
History as class struggle.
Marx’s vision of history and the post-capitalist future.
Time is not merely a silent backdrop upon which events unfold; rather, it is a constitutive element of existence, a mode of being, and a hidden measure of power. When we look at capitalism through Marx’s lens, we do not see it only as an economic system based on commodity exchange and value accumulation, but also as a system that reshapes time itself. In the project of Capital, Marx does not treat time as a neutral flow, but as a means of production, a structure of domination, and a material of conflict. Here, historical time ceases to be a neutral arena where individuals compete and instead becomes a capitalist disciplinary machine through which labor is organized, life rhythms are regulated, and moments are commodified.
One of the greatest transformations wrought by capital is not only in the instruments of production or forms of ownership, but in how humans perceive time. The feudal peasant, bound to the cycles of seasons, agriculture, and weather, is transformed in the industrial society into a worker whose existence is measured by units of hours, and whose value is measured by the capacity to "produce time" and convert it into surplus value. Thus, life itself no longer remains merely work, but life is redefined through labor measured by time, invested as commodities are invested, and pressured as the body is pressured.
In this way, Marx offers one of the most radical analyses of the relationship between time and power: the bourgeoisie do not only control the means of production but reorganize the internal rhythm of human existence. Capitalism does not settle for confiscating labor time; it gradually seizes the existential time of the human being, reducing life to a sequence of productive moments. "Lost time" becomes the enemy, "speed" a virtue, and "time efficiency" a measure of merit. Thus, time itself is reshaped according to market logic, forcing the individual to keep pace with a market that waits for no one, in a time that cannot be reclaimed.
This transformation in the nature of time can only be understood as part of Marx’s broader philosophical project: a project of dismantling modernity from within, not merely as an economic model but as an ontological system that redefines humanity, the world, and time. Capitalist modernity, according to Marx, does not just empty labor of its essence, but also empties time itself of meaning, transforming it into a mere framework for producing value. Hence, time is “reified” just as social and human relations are reified, so that time itself becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, and consumed, rather than truly lived.
In this chapter, then, we will attempt to delve into the temporal character of capital and read time not as an external factor but as an internal structure within the logic of capitalism. We will examine how time transforms into a structure of exploitation and how capitalist power is exercised through the organization of time, no less than through the organization of space. We will explore how capital turns history from a free process into a production schedule, from a collective act into a series of discrete moments, fragmenting experience and dismantling life.
We will re-ask questions long marginalized by economic sciences:
What is time under relations of production?
How does history transform into a capitalist production tool?
And is it possible to imagine a new form of time outside the logic of the market?
With these questions, this chapter enters the core of the Marxist project—not merely as a "critique of political economy," but also as an attempt to liberate time from the grasp of capital, and to rewrite history from the perspective of those whose moments were confiscated, whose lifetimes were stolen, and whose dreams were marginalized under the tyranny of capitalist clocks, schedules, and seasons.
1. Capital as a Moment in the History of Alienation
It is not possible to understand Capital in Marx without situating it in its deeper context: not merely as a critique of an economic system or an analysis of market relations, but as an ontological moment in the history of human alienation. Capital, in this sense, is not something added to the human being, but rather a reification of what has been lost; it is the historical name for a decisive stage in the rupture of the relationship between self and world, between man and his activity, between spirit and matter, between time and being.
Marx presents the concept of alienation (Entfremdung) not as a psychological problem or an individual feeling of estrangement, but as a historical structure rooted in relations of production. Whereas classical philosophy, since Hegel and Feuerbach, treated alienation as a separation between man and his essence, or between reason and reality, Marx reformulates this concept within the framework of labor, property, and power relations. Within this framework, capital becomes the ultimate expression of alienation: the moment when man reaches the peak of losing himself through what he produces. The product, which is the fruit of human labor, no longer remains an extension of the self but becomes an independent force confronting the worker as a stranger, even as an adversary.
The worker is alienated not only from the thing he makes, but from the act of making itself, from the human capacity he exercises, which is reduced to a mere means of subsistence, not an expression of self. Here, labor—which was once the essence of man and the domain of his self-realization—becomes a burden and a source of estrangement. In this context, capital is nothing but the accumulation of this alienation; it is the material embodiment—not only of value—but of lost time, estranged energy, and distorted life.
Capitalism, in Marx’s view, does not create alienation but establishes it as a system and organizes it as an institution. Whereas alienation in earlier eras was incidental or linked to specific social conditions, in the age of capital it becomes the norm, reproduced daily according to the logic of the market. Thus, man no longer owns the means of production; rather, the means own man. Man no longer produces money; money produces man. Life no longer serves as the goal of labor; labor becomes the goal of survival.
Although capitalist modernity may appear as an era of liberation and rationalization, Marx reveals that it reproduces alienation in new, more complex, and more concealed forms. Today, the worker is not enslaved by chains but by necessity; not bound by the body but by contracts; not exiled outwardly but estranged from himself. In this sense, capital does not merely represent the domination of one class over another, but a complete inversion in the relationship between man and his world, where value is redefined not by what is human but by what is exchangeable. Thus, everything becomes salable: time, body, dreams, and even meaning.
The moment of capital in the history of alienation is the moment in which man loses his center, is reduced to a "function bearer," a production unit, an atom in a vast machine whose laws he does not understand. It is the moment history is reduced to an economic schedule, time to production units, and freedom to a choice among commodities.
But this moment is not the end of history—it is the beginning of its awareness. As Marx stated in the preface to Capital: "Consciousness does not change the world, but it cannot be changed without consciousness." Therefore, the analysis of capital is inseparable from the mission to liberate man from this alienation, through revolution not merely as a political event, but as a return to the self, to labor as a creative act, to time as a space of meaning, and to the world as a relationship, not a commodity.
Thus, Capital is read not only as an analysis of reality but as a cry against the world as it is, and a will to create another world, in which man is not a means but an end.
When we reread Capital from the perspective of the history of alienation, we do not merely read economic texts but the very record of human existence rewritten according to the logic of capital. Every social relation, every cultural structure, and every sense of time or self becomes questionable unless analyzed through this extreme alienation. As Marx points out, we no longer live in a world of things, but in a commodity world; a world in which the value of a thing lies not in what it is, but in what it can be sold for. In this context, even human relations are reduced to emotional investments, language to marketing, and freedom to a consumer choice.
Capital alienates man not only from his products but alienates man from his humanity itself, so that the "economic man" becomes the highest model, while creative labor, contemplation, or gratuitous relations are viewed as unproductive or valueless. It is a complete ontological reversal, where existence is reordered according to the market scale, and consciousness is reproduced in the image of profits and losses. In this sense, capital is not merely an economic stage, but an ontological one, in which what is human is reshaped to be functional, not essential; commodity-like, not substantive; temporary, not historical.
2. From Primitive Communism to Capitalism: The Path of Reification
For Marx, capitalism is not understood as a break in human history, but as the culmination of a long trajectory of social and economic transformations, beginning from the moment when primitive communism expressed humanity’s direct relationship with nature and society. In that earliest stage of human history, private property had not yet emerged as a concept separating the “I” from “what I own,” nor had labor become detached from daily life or transformed into an institutionalized burden. Instead, resources were used within a cohesive community, and productive activity itself was imbued with social and existential meaning—not merely a tool for survival or accumulation.
But this organic relationship with nature and society did not last. From the very first moment of separation—whether in the division of labor, the emergence of private property, or the formation of classes—the process of reification (Verdinglichung) began its slow march toward alienating humans from the conditions of their existence. With the development of economic forms—from slavery to feudalism, then to capitalism—social relations were gradually reshaped into relations between things rather than between humans. Here lies the core of Marx’s critique: revealing how human relations are transformed into relations between commodities, and how humans are gradually reduced to functions in the production machine or values in the labor market.
Capitalism, in this sense, is not merely an advanced stage in the development of productive forces, but the peak phase of the reification of the world. It is the point at which social relations themselves—friendship, labor, language, culture—are measured by market criteria. At this moment, the worker no longer sells only his labor but sells his “time,” his “energy,” and “a part of his existence.” The more capitalism advances, the deeper the alienation of the human from himself grows, and the more profound his historical “blindness” becomes toward the conditions of this alienation.
Thus, the transition from primitive communism to capitalism is not merely a change in economic structure but a radical ontological transformation—from man as a free being living in community, to man as a thing that is measured, bought, and sold. This transformation does not simply reproduce material poverty but produces a new kind of poverty: poverty of meaning, poverty of self, poverty of freedom.
Therefore, capitalism cannot be understood without tracing this long path of historical fragmentation, which began with the denaturalization of land and labor and culminated in the dehumanization of man himself. Reification is not an incidental or accidental phenomenon within the capitalist system, but its deep structure: the transformation of everything into a thing, every relation into an equation, every individual into a function. Within this context, history itself becomes raw material reshaped according to the logic of profit, and human consciousness is rebuilt in the image of the market.
3. History as Class Struggle
Marxist theory cannot be understood except by placing the concept of class struggle at the center of its analysis of history. In contrast to idealist conceptions of history, which view it as a gradual development of the spirit (as in Hegel) or an accumulation of technical and political progress (as in liberalism), Marx proposes a radical materialist perspective: history is the history of class struggles. This means not only that classes exist, but that the essence of historical movement lies in the constant tension between those who own the means of production and those who own nothing but their labor power. Thus, every historical moment is not merely the product of ideas or wills, but a reflection of a changing economic structure, which contains within it class contradictions that are prone to explosion.
From the very first division of human societies into masters and slaves, to feudal lords and serfs, and then to bourgeoisie and proletariat, the form of struggle repeats itself, even if its tools and disguises change. The ruling class at each historical stage not only possesses material control but also produces its own ideology and imposes it as universal truth—making rebellion against it difficult not only because power is repressive but because it conceals itself in language, morality, laws, and even in the very mode of thought. Therefore, for Marx, the liberation of the working class is not merely an overthrow of political power, but a liberation of consciousness from the illusions produced by the ruling class.
From this perspective, history is not neutral, linear, or rational, but an open battlefield where the fate of societies is determined by power relations between classes. Marx showed that capitalism, despite its ability to develop rapidly, carries within itself an irresolvable contradiction: it produces a working class that forms the majority, yet keeps it in poverty and alienation, preventing it from controlling what it produces. Hence, capitalist history is a temporary moment, not the end of history, because it is built on an unstable basis—exploitation of the majority for the accumulation of wealth by the minority.
Thus, class struggle is not only read as a social analysis but as a political ontology of history: it reshapes structures and institutions and reveals that what appears natural or eternal is merely the result of the power of one class over another. The more complex the capitalist system becomes, the more complicated the forms through which this struggle manifests—but it never disappears; rather, it is reproduced on deeper levels: in schools, in the media, in the labor market, in the family, and in the symbolic structure of the world.
Therefore, understanding history as class struggle is both a tool for interpretation and a tool for change. Those who realize that relations of exploitation have made the world as we know it will begin to question not only the origin of these relations but also the possibility of transcending them. Thus, history becomes not merely material for study, but a field for revolutionary intervention.
4. Marx’s Vision of History and the Post-Capitalist Future
At the heart of the Marxist project pulses a question that transcends mere critique to anticipate the future: Is it possible to imagine a world beyond capitalism? And what does it mean for history to be open to another possibility? Marx does not stop at analyzing economic structures or deconstructing the logic of exploitation; rather, he lays the foundation for a philosophical-historical vision that sees capitalism, despite its apparent strength, not as the end of history but merely as a transitional stage within a greater dialectical movement. This vision is not based on utopian prophecy or moral desire for justice, but on an internal logic that assumes every system carries contradictions within itself, and that these contradictions, as they accumulate, lead to the system’s transcendence.
Marx sees capitalism as having created the objective conditions for its own transcendence: it liberated the productive forces to an unprecedented degree, integrated societies into a globally interconnected economy, and produced a universal working class that possesses consciousness, labor, and suffering—making it the bearer of a collective liberation project. However, this potential is not realized mechanically; it presupposes a conscious revolutionary intervention, a moment where self-awareness meets the capacity for historical action. Hence, the post-capitalist future, as Marx envisions it, is not a predetermined promise but a historical wager: the possibility that humanity reclaims control over the production of its life, transferring the means of production from the hands of the few to the dominion of the many.
But what is this future? In Marx’s conception, the communist society is not built merely on the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, but on the liberation of man from alienation in all its dimensions: alienation from his labor, from nature, from others, and even from himself. The goal is not merely to improve living conditions but to transform man from an alienated being into a free, creative, and communal subject. The post-capitalist society, in this vision, is not just a new arrangement of wealth, but a new form of human existence that transcends isolated individualism and establishes relations based on cooperation and integration rather than competition and reification.
Nevertheless, Marx did not provide a detailed blueprint for this new society, leaving its features open-ended because he understood that true freedom cannot be imposed from outside but emerges from the historical experience of the producing classes, from their self-awareness, and their long struggle against forms of domination and exploitation. Thus, in Marxist philosophy, the future is not a predetermined endpoint but an open horizon—a project of continuous transformation, reshaped in light of experience and critique, in light of struggle itself.
In this sense, history for Marx is not mere “inevitability,” but revolutionary possibility: a history made not only through what has happened but through what can happen when people become aware that they are not mere cogs in a machine but agents in the making of history itself. Capitalism, then, is not fate, but a stage that can and must be surpassed.
Chapter Seven: The Human and Ethical Dimension in the Critique of Capital
Alienation and Freedom: Man in the Grip of the Market.
Moral Exploitation and Social Inequality.
Marx and Utopia: Is Socialism a Moral Salvation?
The Idea of Justice in Marx: Absent or Implicit?
It is inaccurate to portray Karl Marx as a mere materialist thinker who excludes ethics from his project and reduces man to a function in an economic equation. On the contrary, the heart of the Marxist project beats with a deep feeling of the human tragedy produced by the capitalist era. True, Marx’s language is neither theological nor sermonic, but in the depth of his analysis, he questions the ethics of capitalist modernity—not from a detached theoretical discourse, but from the heart of lived reality. He does not start from ethics, but arrives at it; not as a superimposed system of values, but as a living expression of humanity’s call, which is daily suppressed under the weight of exploitation and alienation.
In this chapter, we approach Marx the human: the one who sees capitalism as a bleeding moral wound, reproduced daily through forced labor, structural poverty, and the negation of the worker’s dignity. The critique of capital, therefore, is not understood merely as a deconstruction of economic structure, but as a philosophical and ethical protest against the degradation of man—his transformation into a mere instrument in a machine indifferent to what he feels, dreams, or creates, caring only about what he produces and accumulates.
The intention here is not to resurrect Marx as a moral preacher, but to highlight how his critical project contains, at its core, a radical ethical question: Who is man? What does he deserve? And what is the meaning of justice in a world ruled by exchange value rather than human value? Marx understood that the market’s ethics are not neutral, but a harsh abstraction that strips man of his meaning, his relationships, and his right to be more than a working being. Hence, the project of Capital is not only an analysis of how commodities are produced, but also a cry against the forgetting of man amid the crowd of goods.
In capitalism, as Marx depicts it, ethics itself becomes a commodity; good is reduced to what is economically useful, and dignity to what can be bought or sold. This is not only a crisis of distribution, but a crisis of values and meanings that empties existence of its content, turning love into service, time into money, and the self into a number in the labor market. Here the ethical dimension of the critique of capital appears: in its quest to reclaim man from the heart of his reduction, from the alienation of his relations, and from the fragmentation of his being.
Yet the ethical dimension in Marxism is not individual ethics or pacifist ethics. It is revolutionary ethics, belonging to struggle, not adaptation; to the dream of liberation, not satisfaction with the status quo. Thus, Marx’s ethics are not built on submission, but on rebellion against all that humiliates man: from hunger, to ignorance, to reification, to the loss of control over the conditions of his life. This makes his project a dual call: to reason to understand, and to conscience to rise.
With this chapter, we do not merely continue an economic analysis, but explore a profound human horizon latent in Capital since its earliest pages: a horizon that sees human liberation as the ultimate purpose of any critique, and the restoration of dignity as the final goal of every revolution. Marxism, no matter how cloaked in scientific language, is essentially a project of salvation: salvation from alienation, exploitation, and separation from self, nature, and others.
Here we do not revive Marx as a philosopher of mercy, but as a thinker who pressed his finger on a wound that never healed: that we live in a world rich in commodities and poor in meaning—a world that profits from everything except its own humanity.
Within this framework, it can be said that Marx’s project redefines ethics not from an external normative perspective, but as a historical necessity stemming from the very conditions of material existence. Under the capitalist system, man is forcibly separated from his product, from his vital energy, from his existential time, and from the community that gives life meaning. Thus, ethics becomes an absent—yet present—structure: absent because the market does not recognize it, yet present because its absence leaves a painful mark on the fabric of daily life, in images of misery, hunger, injustice, and class contempt. It is no longer a matter of the "evil of the rich," but the "negation of man" as an idea and practice. Marx’s answer does not come from preaching to the conscience, but from the very structural roots that make injustice appear natural, and man appear replaceable. Here, the critique of capital becomes a critique of lived ethical reality: from labor relations that produce exploitation, to state institutions that reproduce class stratification, to market culture that legitimizes inequality under the guise of “individual freedom.” Marxist ethics are inseparable from politics and economics; they intertwine as a struggle for dignity. Hence, Capital is not only an anatomy of capitalism, but a profound call to reimagine man—not as consumer or producer, but as a being worthy of living, not investing.
When Marx writes about exploitation, he does not limit himself to revealing the economic relationship between capitalist and worker, but also exposes the moral wound at the heart of modernity: how man is reduced to a means, measured by what he produces rather than what he is. In the heart of every factory, Marx sees an ethical question suspended: how can a system accumulate wealth by extracting life from individuals? Here, ethics is no longer an intellectual luxury or individual religion, but a collective cry echoing in the silence of factories, in the bodies of the exhausted, and in the eyes of children who inherit nothing but sweat and anxiety from their parents.
Thus, ethics in Marx’s project is not a utopian value, but a historical product of a long conflict between man and the conditions that empty him of his humanity. Through this conflict, ethics is reformulated not as top-down commands, but as a liberatory practice, as a collective act aspiring to reclaim life itself. Therefore, the Critique of Political Economy is not only a deconstruction of capitalism, but also a project of justice, dignity, and freeing meaning from the domination of money.
1. Alienation and Freedom: Man in the Grip of the Market
At the heart of Marxist theory, the concept of alienation (estrangement) emerges not merely as a byproduct of the capitalist mode of production, but as a central mechanism that reshapes the human being from within. Man is alienated not only through losing ownership of the product of his labor, but also through his transformation into an incomplete being within a world where he does not control his conditions, does not own his destiny, and finds in his freedom only an empty echo that fails to reach reality. In this framework, the market does not only sell commodities, but reproduces man as a commodity and redefines his freedom according to the logic of supply and demand.
Marx does not view freedom as an individual choice within a neutral ethical context, but as a historical-material condition determined by the conditions of production. The "freedom of the worker" to sell his physical labor power is, in fact, a counterfeit freedom, because the choice between survival and starvation is no choice at all. Thus, freedom falls under the control of the market and is redefined not as man's capacity for self-realization, but as a social fate subject to the needs of capital.
The alienation Marx speaks of extends not only to labor but also to time, language, desire, and meaning. The worker produces what he does not own, consumes what he does not create, and lives within a rhythm not set by himself but dictated by the movement of capital and market fluctuations. He is a being used, consumed, and continuously reshaped to suit the logic of profit rather than the logic of life.
Freedom here, conversely, is not measured by the ability to "choose within the system," but by the capacity to rebuild the system itself. Freedom from the Marxist perspective is liberation from alienation—that is, from social relations that render man a stranger to himself, to others, and to the world. Therefore, Marx’s critique of capitalism is not merely economic or political but existential-ethical, confronting the fundamental question: Why does man live under conditions that deny his humanity?
According to Marx, capitalism alienates man not only by what it takes from him but by what it makes of him: an isolated, competitive individual measured by his market value rather than his dignity, whose relations are defined through money rather than mutual recognition. Thus, freedom becomes a mask for alienation, and the self turns into an economic function rather than an ethical entity.
The market’s grip on man, according to Marx, is not only material but symbolic as well. It redefines success and failure, value and meaning, beauty and utility—all according to the logic of profit and exchange. Even ethics is reduced to "market ethics," where responsibility becomes "efficiency," justice becomes "opportunity," and relationships are measured by return. Thus, man is emptied of his human essence and reshaped to serve an inhuman logic.
In this context, Marx’s critique of alienation cannot be reduced to a critique of an economic relation or a social condition alone; it is fundamentally a critique of the ontology of man as formulated by capitalist modernity. In this modern conception, man is no longer defined by what he is or what he can become, but by what he owns, what he produces, and what he can offer to the market. Thus, the human being is transformed from a conscious, free, creative self into a function in a massive production machine, whose value is determined not by his essence or existence but by his place within a network of economic relations—his "price" on the market.
Alienation for Marx is man’s estrangement from himself, his nature, his creative capacity, his community, and even from the products he creates with his own hands, which no longer belong to him but become part of a hostile power that reproduces the conditions of his exploitation. At the heart of this alienation lies a profound ontological crisis: man is no longer the agent but the acted-upon; no longer the maker of meaning but a victim of a system that empties everything of meaning and reassigns it in the language of exchange value.
In this sense, Marx’s question is less economic and more existential: Who is man in a world that sees him only as a tool? How can the self remain a self while trapped in a logic that recognizes only buyability and sellability? Can man be liberated without liberating our conception of him? This critique goes deeper than economic conditions to strike at the roots of modern philosophy that reduced man to instrumental reason and to a measurable, commodifiable object.
Hence, alienation becomes the moment of revealing that modern man, under capitalism, lives outside himself, consumes his existence without living it, speaks a language that is not his own, and produces a world that does not reflect his truth but distances him from it. Here, Marx’s project becomes not only an attempt to understand the world but to reclaim man from the grip of the market’s ontology—to reclaim his essence, history, meaning, and freedom.
The great paradox is that capitalist modernity, which promised to liberate man from ignorance and constraints, is the very system that reshaped his bondage in a more complex way: a hidden slavery behind the façades of "freedom" and "choice," but a freedom designed within the cage of the market, and a choice limited to what is available for purchase only. Thus, alienation shifts from a mere economic phenomenon to a general mode of existence where human relations become material, transactional, interest-based; love, creativity, identity, and solidarity turn into commodities with a price. In this world, man is alienated not only from others but from his deeper self, his immeasurable dreams, and his meaning that cannot be sold.
Marx, in writing about alienation, did not lament man as a victim but shouted a wake-up call: self-recovery does not happen through nostalgia but through historical action, through revolution against the conditions that produce and cement this alienation. Philosophy here is no longer mere contemplation of meaning but a critical practice striving to return man to himself—not through abstract meditation but through dismantling the structure that turned him into a thing among things, a cog within a machine.
The alienated man is not only a stranger to the world but to his voice, his body, his dreams postponed until after work hours or framed within market advertisements. Thus, the critique of alienation is, in this sense, the first step toward understanding the full human dimension of the critique of capital, where freeing man from his alienation is a necessary condition to liberate history itself from the domination of profit and accumulation laws.
2. Moral Exploitation and Social Inequality
For Marx, exploitation is not merely a hidden economic theft occurring behind the façades of markets and contracts; it is a comprehensive structure of deeply rooted inequality, connected as much to ethics as to economics, to labor as to dignity, to wealth as to power. And if capitalism has historically succeeded in legitimizing this exploitation, it is because it has cloaked it in false ethics that present it as a "natural right" and a "product of personal effort," while in reality it is a social system that cannot exist without radical inequality in opportunities, ownership, and even existential conditions themselves.
Exploitation, in this sense, is not only economic but also moral-political, because it produces an unequal relationship between actors who are unequal in power, yet it is presented as a free contract between two equal parties. This contradiction between reality and legal form hides the deep moral character of the problem: capitalist justice is based on the principle of semblance of equality, not actual equality, and on justifying the gap between rich and poor as a "natural" result of diligence or laziness, not as a structural outcome of the mode of production.
Marx dismantles this deception and reveals that inequality is not a moral failure of the individual but a logical product of a system based on capital accumulation on one side and marginalization of the working classes on the other. Poverty, in this context, is not accidental but necessary. Surplus value—that is, profit—can only be produced when the worker is paid less than what he creates. Thus, inequality does not stem from differences in skills but from the very nature of the system itself.
In capitalism, ethics become a function of profit: good is what increases production, and evil is what disrupts accumulation. Therefore, even human values such as solidarity, compassion, or justice are emptied of their essence and re-appropriated within the logic of the market. Charity to the poor becomes advertising, volunteer work becomes free training, and equality becomes a slogan sold on major brand T-shirts.
Hence, moral exploitation manifests as transforming human suffering into an additional productive tool. The poor are not allowed to protest; rather, they are asked to smile at their exploiters. The marginalized are not seen as victims but as "incompetent." This moral neutralization of social injustice reproduces exploitation as fate, not as a political choice.
With each new production cycle, capitalism reproduces social classes not only economically but also within the collective consciousness: some are born to own, others to serve. Today, this class system is wrapped in soft liberal language—"opportunity," "efficiency," "entrepreneurship"—but essentially it only transforms injustice into incentive, and breakdown into investment opportunity.
Therefore, Marx’s critique of inequality is not simply a defense of social justice; it is a moral deconstruction of the entire system: Where does this gap come from between those who own everything and those who do not even own their bodies? Why is capital rewarded while labor punished? And why is the alienated person burdened with the fault of a system he neither created nor even possesses the tools to change?
In light of all this, exploitation for Marx is more than just a relation of production, and beyond being an economic phenomenon related to wealth distribution or wage-profit disparity. It is, at its core, an ontological relation that reshapes man’s sense of self and redefines the meanings of dignity, freedom, and meaning within the market’s logic. In capitalism, man is not only exploited as a producer but reproduced daily as a functional being, a body required to produce more than it lives, consume more than it dreams, and gradually surrender itself just to remain in the never-ending "work game." Exploitation wounds not only the body but leaves scars deep within: in self-image, in the possibility of freedom, in how man defines his humanity.
Thus, Marx’s critique does not stop at naming injustice but strips it bare, removing its legal and moral mask and revealing it as it is: a negation of man in the name of interest, a deprivation of his humanity under the pretext of necessity or rationalization. Capitalism possesses enough rhetorical tricks to justify all forms of exploitation as "necessary," turning human alienation into a natural law beyond critique, imposed as an unchangeable reality.
Within this framework, Marx’s struggle for social justice is no longer merely a political or economic demand but a battle to reclaim man—not quantitatively or productively, but existentially—as a free being capable of being more than a function, more than a worker, more than a consumer. Marx was not just searching for an alternative system but for an alternative meaning of man, for a new way of life where labor is an act of creation, not enslavement, and freedom is a lived reality, not a slogan above factory gates.
In this sense, Marx’s philosophical struggle was not a triumph of ideology but an attempt to save human being from dissolving into market logic and from reducing human existence to a mere tool in a production machine that never stops. Capitalism, as Marx understood it, is not merely an economic system but a total mode of existence that rearranges the world according to the logic of exchange value, turning man into a thing, his will into a price, and his history into a profit equation.
Thus, Marx’s critique of exploitation transcends the vocabulary of classical political economy to reach the depths of human experience in the modern era. Exploitation, as it appears in Capital, is not measured only by unpaid labor hours but by what is taken from the very essence of man: his freedom, his relation to the world, and his capacity to see himself as more than a tool. Therefore, Marx’s struggle is a struggle for the liberation of man not only from poverty but from being reduced to a function within a system that sees him only as a means to profit.
3. Marx and Utopia: Is Socialism a Moral Salvation?
Marx has long been labeled a "utopian" by his conservative critics and even by some non-Marxist socialist thinkers. But the truth is more complex than can be reduced to a single term. Marx was not a dreamer of a perfect society detached from history, but a critic of reality and an architect of understanding it from within. Nevertheless, his project is not devoid of a redemptive—moral—dimension, yet a salvation that does not come from heaven nor imposed from above, but emerges from the heart of social contradictions and from human awareness of their position within systems of oppression and reification.
The question, "Is socialism a moral salvation?" is not foreign to Marx’s project, despite its materialist nature; rather, it lies at its core. For Marx, socialism is not merely an alternative economic system but an existential liberation from the alienating relations that tore man into worker/commodity, consumer/regulated, exiled from himself through a fragmented chain of roles. Socialism is not just a redistribution of wealth but a dismantling of the conditions of moral-ontological exploitation that formed modern man as a truncated being, separated from his cooperative nature and immersed in relentless competition.
Marx himself was cautious about utopia in the traditional sense. He harshly criticized "imaginative" socialists who envisioned a liberated future without a radical analysis of class reality and conditions of struggle. He believed the path to liberation does not pass through drawing paradise on paper but through understanding the hell we live in. Yet his project remains infused with a deep philosophical hope: that man is not the fate of history but its maker; that the capitalist system is not the end of the world but a temporary chapter in a broader book that can be rewritten.
This hope does not stem from naive optimism but from a materialist vision of history that sees in the living contradictions—between labor and capital, individual and society, need and accumulation—the fuel for igniting transformation. Here lies the real Marxist utopia: not in imagining a world without evil, but in making evil itself visible, exposed, and dismantlable. Not in suppressing conflict, but transcending it through consciousness.
Thus, socialism is not a promise of security but a call for the ethical restoration of man: to be what he is, not what is imposed on him to be; to work in order to live, not to produce surplus for others; to create from himself a shared existence based not on domination but on cooperation and equality.
Here, one may say that socialism for Marx—though not presented as moral salvation in a religious or idealistic form—remains a salvation in the deepest sense: a salvation from reification, alienation, market slavery, and self-estrangement. It is a vision only complete when we understand that Marx, at his core, was not merely a critic of political economy but a philosopher of human dignity.
If capitalism has distorted man in the name of freedom, Marxist socialism strives to reclaim him in the name of truth: the truth that man is not a tool, nor a commodity, nor a number in a production schedule, but an end in himself.
4. Marx’s Idea of Justice: Absent or Implicit?
The discussion of justice in Marx’s thought provokes wide debate among scholars and interpreters. Some argue that Marx ignored the concept of justice because he started from a firm materialist standpoint that rejects ideal or abstract moral values that cannot be grasped within the material history and conditions of human existence. On the other hand, there are those who assert that justice, even if not explicitly articulated in Marx’s formulations, runs as a subtle implicit thread throughout the fabric of his philosophical and social project, both in his critique of capitalism and in his vision of a post-capitalist society.
In traditional Western philosophy, justice was often linked to legal and ethical concepts, derived from ethical theories such as Kantianism or Aristotelianism, emphasizing natural rights or moral duties. Marx, instead of beginning with abstract rights or fixed values, begins with the study of concrete reality, where manifestations of social injustice appear in the exploitation of the working class and the deprivation of the fruits of their labor. Justice in Marx’s thought is not an abstract or theoretical matter, but a concrete material relation concerning how the means of production and wealth are distributed, and how social relations are organized to promote genuine freedom and human dignity.
We can say that justice, for Marx, is embodied in the concept of “material equality,” or what can be called the justice of socialism, which transcends the formal justice of capitalism that grants everyone equal legal rights but leaves vast material disparities intact, perpetuating alienation and exploitation. Under capitalism, the voice of justice is silenced by market laws and property rules that protect the interests of the ruling class, so justice becomes merely an ideological cover hiding the reality of class oppression. For Marx, justice is liberation from these contradictions, rebuilding society on foundations that enable every person to fulfill themselves and live with true dignity.
But why do we not find the term “justice” explicitly or prominently in Marx’s writings? Here, we can understand that Marx rejected turning justice into an absolute value or fixed standard because he believed that all values and ideas are produced under specific historical conditions and change with social and economic structures. Justice, in his view, is not a fixed value but a material historical product reflecting the interests of the dominant class or the social revolution that overthrows it. Therefore, justice for Marx is mutable, linked to material conditions and the history of class struggle. In summary, justice in Marx is not absent but implicit, intertwined in his deep analysis of capitalism and in his vision of the radical change needed to free humanity from exploitation and reification. It is not merely a moral issue but a historical one, connected to the process of redistributing power and wealth and creating conditions of equality for all members of society, far from social injustice and structural misery.
Thus, we can conclude that justice in Marxist thought is historical-material justice, a practical-liberatory process rooted in class struggle and revolutionary practice, not simply an ethical term or an abstract legal concept.
The moral dimension of Marx’s idea of justice is clearly manifested in his critique of the phenomenon of alienation that ravages humans under the capitalist system. Man is not only exploited materially but estranged from his essence as a productive and free agent, as labor transforms from an act of self-realization into a mere means of earning a living, from a creative human act into a mechanical activity that strips man of his humanity. This alienation is, at its core, a violation of the simplest principles of justice, which presuppose the recognition of man as a free subject and a being of value, not as a tool for profit or a commodity bought and sold.
Within this framework, justice emerges as a practical ethical demand to liberate man not only from economic injustice but also from the estrangement of his self and his relation to the world around him. Justice here is the restoration of “human dignity,” which erodes under the pressure of market laws and capitalist accumulation rules. This demand is fundamental because it forms the basis of any genuine emancipatory project, for a just society cannot be built unless man is regarded as an ethical subject, not merely an economic object.
Therefore, justice for Marx is not an abstract principle or a utopian moral value suspended above reality but the product of a profound tension between what is and what ought to be. It is not a normative issue discussed in a conceptual vacuum but arises from within history, from the heart of class contradictions and the cries of the human being alienated from himself. Justice, from the Marxist perspective, is a material practice born out of struggle, neither granted from above nor framed as an eternal law, but wrested amid contradictions between productive forces and relations of production. In this sense, justice becomes the most intense expression of humanity’s need to reclaim existence, not as an abstract idea but as a concrete daily reality realized through liberating humans from the systems that create their alienation.
Hence, justice in Marx cannot be separated from the dialectic of man, labor, and property. Justice is not merely wealth redistribution but the redefinition of all human relations. It requires a change in consciousness and in the way social life is organized so that man regains his central position as an active subject, not merely a policy object or a commodity in the market. Therefore, the moral dimension in Marx’s critique is inseparable from the political and social dimensions; it is a condition for radical change. When man is reduced to a mere production factor, talking about justice becomes an intellectual luxury unless the conditions enabling man to be truly free—not just legally, but in everyday life—are reshaped.
Since capitalism reduces everything to an exchange relation, justice is reduced to a formal equivalence between inherently unequal parties. Here, Marx intervenes to show that true justice can only be achieved by breaking this false symmetry, by dismantling the structure that produces exploitation and then justifies it. Every structure producing permanent inequality is fundamentally unethical, even if it appears legal or natural.
Justice, then, is not the balance between owner and worker but the negation of the relationship that makes one an owner and the other compelled to sell himself to live. It is a call to rebuild the world on new foundations where man is not a means of generating surplus value but the end of every economic, social, and historical activity. Marxist justice, at its core, is not only what ought to be but what we must become: reclaiming our capacity to be human beings, not things produced, consumed, and forgotten.
? Chapter Eight: Capital in the Light of Postmodernism and Contemporary Critique
Post-Marx readings: Lukács – Gramsci – Frankfurt School.
Postmodern Marxism: Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard.
Critique of the centrality of economy in Marx.
Is Capital still valid for understanding digital capitalism?
When Marx wrote Capital, time was confidently moving toward "progress," and modernity was shaping the world under the banner of reason, science, linear history, and increased material production as the standard of advancement. Marx, although a child of this era, was one of its most prominent deconstructors. But more than a century and a half later, the world is no longer the same, and capitalism is no longer critiqued from a "pre-" standpoint but from a space exploded by the "post" — the postmodern world that no longer believes in grand narratives, nor utopia, nor fixed identity, nor a single truth. From here arises the problem this chapter addresses: What is the fate of Capital as a comprehensive critical project in the postmodern world? Does it still possess interpretive and transformative power in an age of doubt, fragmentation, and the invisible market?
At the heart of postmodernism lies a deconstruction of the binaries on which modern thought was built: reason/irrationality, center/margin, truth/illusion, subject/self. With this deconstruction, belief in a solid infrastructure guiding history collapses. Does this mean the collapse of Marx’s project based on political economy as the base structure of superstructures? Or, on the contrary, is Capital the text that anticipated this fragmentation from the start, as it read in capitalism a self-tendency toward fragmentation, uncertainty, and the absorption of meaning from everything?
The capitalism Marx described in the 19th century produced commodities in factories and accumulated value through labor; today, it produces images, accumulates value in desire, and reifies humans through complex networks of media, technology, marketing, and data. Digital capitalism feeds not only on surplus labor but on surplus attention and reshaping the self to fit the market. Yet what Marx called "alienation" has not disappeared; it has intensified: humans are no longer only alienated from the product of their labor but from their digital selves that move in a virtual space, monitored, measured, and exploited.
Thus, this chapter aims not only to compare Marx with postmodern thinkers but to explore the depth of the Marxist vision as an open text for analysis, interpretation, and rereading. Can the dialectical materialist method survive postmodern deconstruction? Can the tools of Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard be used to deconstruct Capital itself? Or did Marx, in some way, precede them by making Capital a "metaphysics" of reality — a system producing meaning and identity as it produces commodities?
Here, Capital transforms into more than a book or an economic-social project. It is a mirror of our time, a text open to multiple readings and critical renewal, provided that Marx is not fixed as an ideological icon but returned to life as a living thought that breathes from the struggle of reality, feeds on the clash of ideas, and continuously transforms like the reality it was born into. Perhaps Marx’s greatest contribution in the postmodern era is teaching us that nothing is neutral: neither labor, nor thought, nor market, nor even truth.
In this context, Marx cannot be understood as a simplistic opposite to postmodernism, nor reduced to classical Enlightenment rationalism. At his core, Marx was not a bearer of a closed scientistic project but rather a seeker exposing the structural contradictions that move reality and produce domination. Although he focused on labor, economy, and class, his vision deeply included a critique of representation, illusion, and the construction of meaning within the structure. This point made some postmodern thinkers—despite their apparent disagreements with him—stand closer to him than they admitted, since Marx did not see the world as a ready "truth," but as a historically conditioned and socially constructed process. In this sense, one could say Marx was, indirectly, one of the pioneers paving the way for a deconstructive thought, albeit in a materialist form.
Capital remains today a resistant book against the end of history and rejects the idea that reality is unchangeable. It is a book not to be read as a manual but as a deep excavator into the fabric of time and place, seeking the logic of contradiction rather than compromise. Its distinction against neoliberal globalization and consumer society lies in offering not a moral interpretation of the world, but a radical deconstruction of how this world is built through relations of power, authority, and interest. Thus, reading Capital in the postmodern age is not merely a return to Marx but a radical confrontation with the question: Is it still possible to think about changing the world, or has every attempt been reabsorbed into the market game?
From this perspective, Capital becomes more than just a critique of capitalism; it is also a philosophical mirror for understanding the self in the postmodern world, where values are replaced by spectacles, and human relations are reduced to consumerist symbols. What Marx revealed about the reification of humans has not lost its relevance but has taken more hidden and complex forms in the era of networks and data. Therefore, invoking Marx today does not mean clinging to a ready-made prescription but resuming a project unfinished: the project of liberating humans from all that distorts them, even if it wears the mask of freedom.
1. Post-Marx Readings: Lukács – Gramsci – Frankfurt School
When Marx died, his project did not die with him; rather, it began to transform into a fertile intellectual heritage, subject to rereading, interpretation, and critique by thinkers who sought not to repeat his words, but to renew his position within the context of historical and social transformations. The "post-Marx Marx" was not the same as the one who wrote Capital in the nineteenth century; instead, in the hands of critical heirs, Marx became an open philosophical horizon addressing new questions about consciousness, culture, ideology, art, power, and resistance. Here precisely emerge three central stations that contributed to moving Marxism from the analysis of production relations to the analysis of the structure of consciousness and hegemony: Lukács, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School.
a. Lukács: From "Class in Itself" to "Class for Itself"
In his pioneering work History and Class Consciousness (1923), Georg Lukács reformulated Marxism as a dialectical philosophy of historical consciousness. The worker was no longer only the alienated being under conditions of labor, but also the being capable of overcoming alienation through awareness of that alienation. Here emerges the concept of "class consciousness" as a decisive moment in the formation of historical subjectivity.
Marx, in his classical reading, highlighted the objective relation between the proletariat and capital. Lukács pushes the analysis further: liberation is impossible unless the working class realizes it is this historical contradiction itself, and that its task is not only to end exploitation but to transcend the social form it produces.
Thus, the "commodity" for Lukács is not merely an economic structure but a structure of consciousness, reifying humans and alienating them from their reality. In a world where social relations turn into things, the critique of alienation becomes an ontological critique of reality itself, not just material conditions. In this way, Marx enters the realm of cultural philosophy through the gate of consciousness, not just economics.
b. Gramsci: Hegemony and Culture – Revolution from Above
Antonio Gramsci, the Italian thinker who wrote his Prison Notebooks under fascist incarceration, was among the first to realize that class struggle is not decided solely in factories or on battlefields, but in the cultural space where meaning is produced. Here Gramsci transfers Marxism from the field of production to the field of cultural hegemony.
In his view, the bourgeoisie does not rule only through control of the means of production but also by imposing its worldview as a "common sense" accepted by the lower classes as an inevitable fate. Hence, the revolutionary task is no longer only to overthrow the state, but to dismantle the culture that legitimizes and makes the bourgeois state acceptable.
With this shift, the intellectual becomes a central actor in Gramsci’s thought: not merely an interpreter of reality but a participant in its construction. He is the "organic intellectual" who belongs to his class and contributes to building an alternative narrative that undermines bourgeois hegemony. Marx’s project thus became more complex: from changing the infrastructure to constructing a counter-hegemonic cultural superstructure speaking for the marginalized rather than about them.
c. Frankfurt School: Critical Marxism and the Declining Reason
With the Frankfurt School, founded in Germany in the 1920s, Marx enters into dialogue with Freud, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. Capitalism is no longer only a system of exploitation but a system producing false consciousness and reshaping the individual into a submissive consumer.
Habermas, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse all recognized that capitalist modernity does not collapse solely under the weight of economic crises but also under the burden of its cultural and intellectual alienation. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer criticize instrumental reason that reduces humans from conscious subjects to numbers in a seemingly neutral technological system serving the existing order. Marcuse, in One-Dimensional Man, diagnoses how democracy loses its meaning when freedom becomes a choice among similar commodities.
The Frankfurt School was not orthodox Marxism but an open, self-critical Marxism that even critiqued Marxism itself, especially when it turns into a new ideology. They posed the difficult question: what if the revolution itself becomes a new tool of oppression? This led them to shift focus from revolution to liberation—not only of the class but of the human being from all that robs them of their selfhood.
Conclusion: Marxism’s Plurality and Unity of Project
In the readings of Lukács, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School, we see how Marx’s project remained alive not because it was "correct" in every detail but because it was fertile enough to be reconsidered by every generation. Capital shifted from a critique of the economy to a key for understanding culture, consciousness, power, art, and even language.
If Marx once said, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it," his heirs added: change is impossible without understanding the new mechanisms of hegemony, which are no longer produced only in the factory but also in schools, media, ethics, and even within the self.
Thus, post-Marx Marxism remains not a mere repetition of the founder’s voice but a diversification of it—or, rather, a collective playing of the original tune of critiquing modernity for a freer, more conscious, and more liberated humanity.
2. Postmodern Marxism: Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard
With the transformations of the twentieth century, Marxism faced profound challenges on multiple levels—political, intellectual, and cultural—that led some thinkers to reformulate Marxism’s very roots. In the horizon of postmodernity, where concepts of power, knowledge, and the self are transformed, Marx’s reading no longer remains confined to pure economic analysis or traditional class struggle but expands to include new critical dimensions focusing on discourses, symbolic systems, and socio-cultural formations. Among the most prominent thinkers who articulated this critical intersection between Marxism and postmodernism are Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard.
Michel Foucault: Power and Knowledge as a Decentralized Network
Foucault is considered one of the foremost critics who helped dissolve the sharp boundaries between economic, political, and cultural structures. In his analysis of power, he rejected the traditional Marxist view that links power exclusively to the economy or the state. Instead, he presented power as a complex network of relations diffused throughout all institutions of society—schools, hospitals, prisons, and media.
Foucault argues that power is not exercised only top-down but spreads into every corner of daily life, intertwined with knowledge in what he calls the “power-knowledge relation.” Through this analysis, power is no longer confined to capital or the state but is a continuous production of individuals and the self, shaped through mechanisms of discipline, training, and surveillance.
This poses a decisive challenge to classical Marxism: How do we understand resistance in the presence of a decentralized, non-centralized power? How do we rethink class and social relations when power and knowledge are inseparably fused? These questions led Foucault to draw on Marxist critique but to transcend it toward a deeper and more complex analysis of domination mechanisms.
Gilles Deleuze: Dialectical Transcendence and Counter-Metaphysics
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who collaborated extensively with Foucault, pursued a similar line by proposing a philosophy opposing the dominant self and rationality of modernity. For Deleuze, the critique of Capital is not only through the dialectic of economic contradictions but through reflections on “desire,” “multiplicity,” and “difference.”
Deleuze adopts the concept of “flow” as an alternative to the rigid structures shaped by capitalism, rejecting discourses that confine thought within fixed binary frames such as working class versus capital, or good versus evil. He opens the horizon to a world governed by “branchings,” where resistance exists not only in explicit political forms but in the subtle everyday practices of liberation from dominant forms through diversifying methods and practices.
Deleuze’s philosophy intersects with Marx’s critique by his conviction that the struggle for change should not remain confined to fixed structures but transform into continuous liberatory movements adopting multiple and unpredictable forms that reshape the very concept of revolution.
Jean Baudrillard: Simulation and the Collapse of Value in the Consumer Society
Baudrillard offers one of the most powerful postmodern critiques of capitalism in its contemporary form, especially in the context of the “consumer society” and the “economy of signs.” He argues that modern capitalism no longer relies solely on the production of goods and services but on the production of images and symbols that dominate consciousness, so that reality itself becomes mere “simulation” with no original truth behind it.
In his works The Consumer Society and Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard explains how value is no longer tied merely to labor or material substance but to the image of commodities, brands, and symbols that turn the consumer into a being living in a world of signs devoid of real reference.
This analysis constitutes a harsh critique of traditional Marxism, which bases value on labor as the source of all wealth. For Baudrillard, value becomes a complex symbolic game that strips humans of meaning and traps them in an endless consumerist whirlpool.
Conclusion:
Reading Marx in the postmodern context through Foucault, Deleuze, and Baudrillard opens a new horizon for understanding Capital not only as a relation of production but as an interconnected system of complex relations involving power, knowledge, desire, and simulation—understood only by surpassing modernity’s linear and historical vision. These thinkers did not simply copy Marx but reestablished him within a network of new questions seeking to understand how forms of domination transform, how the concept of the human changes in a shifting world, and how to resist a system more complex and symbolic than ever before.
In this sense, Marxism remains alive and capable of critique and creativity through the postmodern horizon, extending beyond economics to culture, power, and existence itself.
Reconsidering Capital from the postmodern perspective opens new avenues for grasping the modern complexities of the capitalist system, where exploitation is no longer limited to the economic but extends to cultural and political dimensions in which power and identity intersect. Thus, Marxism remains a vital critical tool supporting resistance to alienation in its renewed forms and calling for the liberation of humanity in a rapidly changing, increasingly complex world.
3. Critique of the Centrality of Economy in Marx
Within a comprehensive understanding of Marx’s critical project, the critique of the centrality of economy is indispensable for decoding the complex relationship between economy and society, matter and thought, and between the infrastructure and the cultural-political superstructure. Although Capital is often presented as a purely economic text, Marx did not confine himself to narrow economic analysis but transcended it to establish a comprehensive critical vision that reveals the limits of classical economics and the illusions of economic centrality in interpreting reality.
Marx’s critique of economic centrality is manifested in his rejection of viewing the economy as an independent, sole factor mechanically governing the movement of history and society. For him, the economy is not merely a system of commodity exchange or financial calculations; rather, it is a network of intertwined social relations linked to cultural, political, and intellectual dimensions, which interact dialectically. Thus, Marx views the economy as the “infrastructure” that largely determines the “superstructure” of ideas and institutions, but this superstructure is not simply a passive reflection of the base; it possesses the capacity to influence the development of the base itself. This means economic analysis must include understanding these complex interactions.
On this basis, Marx denies the centrality of economy in the sense of a complete separation between the economy and other fields of social life. He sees economic analysis as an integrated necessity alongside the analysis of class struggle, ideological consciousness, religion, politics, and culture. Economies do not develop in isolation from the ideologies that justify and reproduce the system, nor from the social struggles that shape and are simultaneously reproduced by them. The capitalist market economy is not merely a machine for producing and exchanging commodities but a complex system of relations that produce and impose new forms of power and domination.
In his critique of economic centrality, Marx also corrects the common mistake of reading his analyses as purely economic, emphasizing that his project is a comprehensive critique of social relations and human existence under capitalism. Thus, the economy emerges as part of a wider system relating to power, consciousness, ideology, and history. This means understanding Capital cannot be limited to calculations of value and markets alone but must be interpreted within the network of social and cultural relations that form the real ground of the capitalist system.
Marx’s critique of economic centrality invites us to move beyond the view of the economy as an isolated system toward a multidimensional critical conception linking economy with culture, politics, and ideology. It reveals how economic relations are social bonds governing all aspects of life but are also connected to mechanisms of power and conflict that produce and reshape reality. Consequently, Capital becomes a point of departure for a contemporary critical understanding that does not reduce history and society to mere economic accounts but reaffirms the centrality of the human as the producer of reality and conditions of existence through complex, multifaceted practices.
This comprehensive critical vision that Marx offers forms the foundation for an analysis that transcends traditional economic analysis and establishes a critical methodology integrating economy with political, social, and cultural realms, allowing a deeper reading of the capitalist system, the structural crises shaking it, and the possibilities of radical change that go beyond mere wealth redistribution to include redefining human existence itself within history.
4. Is Capital Still Valid for Understanding Digital Capitalism?
With the profound transformations witnessed in the digital age and the global economy’s shift towards what is called “digital capitalism” or “knowledge capitalism,” critical questions arise about the adequacy of Marx’s traditional analysis of Capital for understanding this new phenomenon. Is the Capital that Marx defined in the nineteenth century as a critical tool for analysis still valid and suitable for dealing with the economy of digital networks, where technology blends with information and forms of production and exchange radically change?
In fact, although digital capitalism appears superficially new and revolutionary, its essence does not depart from the fundamental rules of the capitalist system described by Marx: capital accumulation, exploitation of labor, and the social relations that the market reifies. Even as technology becomes a central factor of production, labor—whether material or intellectual—remains the primary source of value, while mechanisms of exploitation and accumulation continue to take shape, albeit in new forms and methods.
However, this does not mean that traditional Marxist analysis alone is sufficient. Digital capitalism introduces new dimensions regarding the nature of labor, which often becomes “immaterial labor,” based on knowledge, creativity, and innovation, much of which takes place in virtual, informally organized spaces, complicating the process of exploitation and value measurement. Moreover, major technology networks—companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook—not only control production but also the flow of information and the cognitive infrastructure of the world, raising questions about the nature of digital capital that transcends traditional ownership to encompass dominance over data and digital surveillance.
Therefore, it can be said that Marx’s concept of capital retains a solid critical framework on which to build an understanding of digital capitalism, but it requires conceptual development and methodological expansion that integrates traditional political economy with new concepts related to data, information, surveillance, and technological power. This means Marxist critique must engage with technological transformations and interpret them through the lens of social relations—not as independent technologies but as part of a new accumulative domination system that reproduces alienation and exploitation in renewed forms.
In conclusion, the Marxist notion of “capital” remains the cornerstone for understanding the deep dynamics of contemporary digital capitalism. It is not merely a traditional economic analytical tool but a comprehensive intellectual system capable of revealing the fundamental contradictions of this new system. Nevertheless, it is insufficient to simply reapply Marx’s classical analyses unchanged to today’s phenomena; rather, this critical framework must be expanded to include the qualitative developments in production, labor, and power in the digital age.
Digital capitalism does not only transform commodities into digital products but also reshapes social relations through data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, redefining the value of labor and methods of exploitation in more complex and hidden ways. These new forms of exploitation and reification cannot be deeply understood without incorporating critical perspectives that address the role of information, technological surveillance, and how technology is used as a tool for controlling individuals, societies, and the global labor market.
Thus, reinterpreting Capital in this context requires transcending narrow economic debates toward philosophical and social analyses that consider the radical shifts in power and control brought by digitalization. Digital capital should be understood not only as an economic asset but as a social and political force capable of shaping collective consciousness and directing human choices even in everyday life.
At the heart of this discussion remains the fundamental issue of liberating humanity from the constraints of the digital capitalist system, where the experience of alienation persists albeit in altered forms. Knowledge workers and data producers remain bound by unjust relations of production, where knowledge and expertise are sold and exploited within a complex network of technological and economic domination.
Therefore, no critical analysis of digital capitalism can ignore the human and ethical dimension, nor the human struggle to reclaim dignity and freedom in the face of a system that reduces their role to a mere resource in the capital accumulation equation. Within this framework, the Marxist method remains critical and vital—not only for understanding the present but for imagining a liberatory future where humans can regain control over their means of production and social relations, surpassing the limitations imposed by new forms of capitalism.
Thus, Capital today becomes not only an object of economic analysis but a renewed philosophical and political battleground that poses the eternal question of human nature, existence, and freedom in a changing world—making Marxist critique an essential tool to decode digital capitalism and confront its structural challenges.
? Conclusion of the Research
1. General Conclusions and Philosophical Analyses
This research, through its multiple chapters, has revealed the depth of the Marxist project, which transcends the economic framework to become a comprehensive socio-philosophical project. We have demonstrated that Capital is not merely an analysis of a production system or an explanation of profit, but a radical critique of modern social life and a philosophical tool for understanding how human relations with the world and the self are constructed through a complex network of economic, political, and cultural forces. Marx was not merely a critic of capitalism as an economic system, but a thinker seeking to uncover the hidden truth behind everyday phenomena, tracing class struggles and the structural contradictions governing history. Here lies the dialectical analysis that deconstructs the contradictions between labor and commodity, between human and machine, between freedom and alienation, all within a dynamic socio-historical framework.
These conclusions go beyond describing phenomena to critically analyzing the capitalist ideology that seeks to conceal the essence of exploitation and alienation behind the veil of the market and legal contracts, transforming humans into mere functional entities within the equation of production and accumulation. Thus, the research affirms that understanding capitalism through Marx’s perspective is understanding the relationship of humans to themselves, others, and the world— a relationship intertwined with freedom and oppression, consciousness and domination, existence and alienation.
2. The Impact of Capital on Modern Political Philosophy
Marx’s critique of Capital has profoundly influenced contemporary political philosophy, reintroducing questions of power, freedom, justice, and identity within the context of social and economic struggles. Today, thinkers engage with Marxist concepts across diverse intellectual schools—from traditional Marxism to critical theory, from cultural Marxism to postmodern currents—that employ Marx’s tools to analyze power and domination in novel ways.
Modern political philosophy has been shaped by this vision that places humans at the center of historical struggle and emphasizes class struggle as a fundamental condition for individual and societal liberation. Marx’s analyses of economic power as a central source of political domination have made critical understanding of capitalism essential for comprehending patterns of repression and authoritarianism in both democratic and dictatorial regimes, as well as in advanced and developing societies alike.
3. Future Horizons of Marxist Theory
As we enter the era of digital and post-industrial capitalism, Marxist theory faces new challenges but also opens fertile horizons for renewal. Changes in the nature of labor, digital technologies, the knowledge economy, and new strategies for controlling production and data demand a renewed reading of Marx’s concepts, especially those of labor, alienation, and accumulation.
The future of Marxist theory lies in its ability to adapt to and critically analyze these transformations, employing both old and new tools to understand emerging structures of social and economic domination. Moreover, the theory can play a pivotal role in formulating emancipatory alternatives that place humans at the center of productive and historical processes, reconstructing their relations with society and nature beyond the logic of greedy accumulation and technological domination.
Thus, Marxism remains not only a critical theory but a liberatory project calling for the reordering of the world on the foundations of justice, equality, and human dignity.
4. A Call to Reread Marx as a Philosopher of Material Existence
Rereading Marx does not mean merely returning to his historical writings, but reopening a profound philosophical dialogue with his entire intellectual project. Marx should be regarded as a philosopher of material existence who made matter not just an object of study but a fundamental condition of human existence and consciousness. He achieved a qualitative philosophical shift by transforming philosophy from a reflection on ideas into a material study of the social and economic relations that shape consciousness and being.
This reading places humans at the heart of history as material beings who simultaneously transform and are shaped by their conditions of existence through practical activity—not as beings whose fate is determined by vague concepts or forces beyond their will. Hence, the call to move beyond narrow or ideological readings of Marx and reinterpret him as a philosopher who struggled for true freedom and posed the question of existence from a material critical perspective, restoring regard for humans as free, active, and creative agents confronting a system that threatens their very existence.
In conclusion, Marxism remains a living intellectual and political project that challenges its times and evolves with them. It must be rediscovered and revitalized today more than ever, not only as an analytical tool but as a methodology of liberation that places humans and material existence at the core of its genuine concern.
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- Karl Marx: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vols. 1-3), Translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin Classics, 1990.
· Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit, Translated by A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977.
· György Lukács: History and Class Consciousness, Translated by Rodney Livingstone, MIT Press, 1971.
· Antonio Gramsci: Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Edited and translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, International Publishers, 1971.
· Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment, Translated by John Cumming, Verso, 1997.
· Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995.
· Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Translated by Robert Hurley et al., University of Minnesota Press, 1983.