ABSTRACT
Following Marx’s passing Marxism, the body of thought claiming lineage to Marx, was construed as historical materialism, a master theory of historical directionality portending a socialist historical outcome, with Marx’s economic studies in Capital then slotted in as but a subtheory. The antinomies of this perspective are traced through its evolution in the hands of Marxist figures Karl Kautsky, Georg Lukács and Louis Althusser. It reprises the rift in philosophy of science from positivism toward irrealism. The key to Marx is apprehending the cognitive sequence in his work. That is, because it is only capitalism that reveals its economic life transparently or its substructure separated from the superstructure, the possibility of scientifically studying the material life of all societies begins with the economic theorizing of capital. Marx maintained his Capital to be the founding work of a new social science. It is precisely predicated upon the peculiar ontological properties of his theoretical object that Marx believed objective knowledge in economic theory is possible. What is explored is how Marx himself elaborated in Capital the task of economic theory to “follow” or “copy” the causal tendency of capital toward self-abstraction and the “purifying” of society of noneconomic, non-capitalist encumbrances.
