ABSTRACT
It is customarily expected of a work on the political economy of capitalism that it should open with a discussion of what capitalism is, leading to the production of a working definition to be used in the text. This book, however, is based upon a completely different logic. Unlike the present literature in the field, it seeks to identify its subject matter by a continuous sceptical doubt of its material reality. At the core of its argument is the hypothesis that capitalism is an intellectual construction that aims to provide an ultimate system of meaning to reality: a metaphysical construction. Such metaphysics, as we will see, is logically wrong, limited and limiting to such an extent as to completely inhibit individual understanding. As a consequence, to work as a social glue, it can only exist in the belief that it is universal to mankind, thus powerfully effacing, with human understanding, material reality itself.
