Marx don’t miss.
In a comparison of present hegemonic productive structures (bourgeois capitalism) the economist wish to ahistorically conceptualize the capitalist mode of production as the natural order of man as society. Just as the theologian relegated their religion as the totalizing explanatory realm of the world.
In its persistence, capitalism as an ideology has deified itself as eternal, just like every single power structure before it thought itself the natural order of man, and god of society. With each revolution man qua man killed yet another ruling class socially imposed god, in its momentum toward post-scarcity.
Now we’re here. In the twilight of capital, trying to kill the commodity form, a god that necessarily requires some social self-destruction.
We can carry that abstraction forward, into the the larger concatenation, the abstract holy grounds of the commodity, the market, autonomous, and behaving much more like the destructive Gods of the Old Testament, of Zeus enraged, of the world destroyers.
This begets the question, how, historically were the old gods replaced by the new? Explanatory power, and social revolution in production. Marx, in demystifying capital, did what the revolutionary scientists of modernity did to the mysteries of nature systematizing scientific literacy, what the Christ figure did to the Judeo curtain of separation from God to common man, to making the form of God inherently human. Marx made the mysteries of money and commodity accessible, understandable, and knowable.
Karl Marx is not, for us, the infant whimpering in the cradle or the bearded man who frightens priests. He is none of the anecdotal episodes of his biography, no brilliant or gauche gesture of his outward human animality. He is a broad and serene thinking brain, he is an individual moment in the anxious search that humanity has been conducting for centuries to acquire consciousness of its being and its becoming, to grasp the mysterious rhythm of history and disperse the mystery, to be stronger in its thinking and to act better. He is a necessary and integral part of our spirit, which would not be what it is if he had not lived , had not thought, had not sent sparks of light flying from the collision with his passions and his ideas, his sufferings and his ideals.
-Antonio Gramsci, Our Marx
Know thy history; to kill a god one only need to unravel the mysteries of its divinity.
Marx, from “The Poverty of Philosophy”
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