There is an admonition that runs throughout Marx’s corpus: don’t judge an
individual, a class, an era, or a social formation by what it says or thinks
about itself; judge it by what it does.^23 As much as the phenomena of capi-
talism may sayto us, Marx is not primarily concerned with this saying, with
this way capitalism sets itself forth in speech. There is a level of Wirklichkeit
or happening that exceeds the science of political economy. Marx’s aim in
escorting us through this science is to open us to the trace of this material-
ity. The appearance of bourgeois wealth threatens to paralyze common action
with fear and suspicion. But, just as Dante’s body can always preserve him
from the paralyzing appearance – which is threatened but never actually pre-
sents itself – so also, as long as we are embodied social beings, it is never
quite too late for us to avert our eyes, to look away from the always impend-
ing capitalist fantasia towards the coming force of transformation within our-
selves. This is the empowering transformation promised by the katabasis
through political economy. Our Virgil holds out to his readers this prospect
of founding a fourth empire – to succeed the Roman, Catholic, and Modern
Empires – the counter-empire of materiality, of revolution, of the multitude.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
In this essay, I hope to have accomplished three tasks. First, I hope, through
my re-reading of the 1859 Preface, to have driven a wedge between Marx’s
critique of political economy and what Terrell Carver aptly summed up as
the “boringly literal” approaches that assimilate these texts to a modern pro-
ject of techno-scientific knowing. Certainly, Marx puts on the mask of the
economist, but there is good reason to be suspicious of this mask. Second –
and giving some content to the first point – I hope to have made an admit-
tedly provocative, but also serious and textually grounded case for an alter-
native reading, according to which Marx plays Virgil, leading his readers on
a tour of the dead concepts of political economy in order, in the end, to set
us free from the paralyzing mystique of science. I don’t imagine that this
reading is uncontroversial, but I think the textual evidence I have cited can-
not be ignored, and that my reading of that evidence is plausible.
The Origin of Political Economy and the Descent of Marx • 57(^23) See, e.g., Marx’s dissertation (Marx and Engels 1975a vol. 1:84); The Holy Family
(1975 vol. 4:37); The German Ideology(1975 vol. 5:62); and A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy(1970:21).