The Red Thread of Humanity

Abstract Is Marx’s Capital a work of philosophy, or rather a work of social science? In his recent book Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy, Christoph Schuringa argues that in Capital, Marx sought to provide workers with scientific knowledge about capitalist society, hoping to empower them to change theirs, but that he thereby brought philosophy into its own from out of a merely contemplative condition. In this paper I propose an alternative interpretation of how Marx actualised philosophy with Capital, i.e. that he used the book philosophically to undermine the science of political economy because its confusions were, he thought, a barrier to human self-emancipation.