The New Novalis’ Bible, Watts of Power and Reverend Karl: A Criticism on Marx’s Philosophy of History

I. INTRODUCTION

Criticism and opening to creativity. The cognitive instinct and respect to cultural norms that allow us to bookishly, contemplatively or rationally move from a concept or a fact to multiple theories, despite of disagreements and incongruences amidst them, have been long unfolded in the European intellectual stage. From the edges and dawn of reason, human nature has struggled to become itself, something else and beyond. Theodore Adorno credited perverse logics of optimizing processes to modern human reason's complex nature. Those logics are not, by any means, irrational ones. ${}^1$ Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud also touched the boundaries of human reason and irrationality. ${}^2$ Reason, irrationality, formal logics or phenomenon intrinsic logics are not identical despite their possibilities of being related. Reason is a conscience's faculty. Irrationality may be a dysfunction of psychic structures or even part of mind's constitution depending on how we may face its psychanalytical triadic nature, with its historical or anthropological causes. Logics are relations and/or rules that structure events, understanding and somehow even things own nature, hanging a little unstable on the boundaries between logics, ontology and metaphysics.

The discourse cut across its on constituent enunciations and subjects, while not conscious phenomena and outcomes move along through consciousness and choices-actions consequences under structural updating processes. Those processes can change culture or subjects, but there is always an intentional surplus that may produce a little bit more or a little bit less of result-based consequences according to predetermined choices and actions. This works over actions and speech actions, words and movements, reintroducing us to the boundaries between logics, language, and phenomena, as well as to the forms of their understanding. This is mentioned here because of the relations one may suppose be real and occur related to accurate interfaces of events and understanding. Logics overlaying ontology. Metaphysics overlaid by philosophy of history. This is important to be considered when evaluating the dialectics between history-the narrative and/or form of knowledge-and History-the phenomenon even if identified with its representations. ${}^3$

Under a few set of perspectives, Friedrich Hegel's philosophical enterprise meant to make move forward the dense philosophy developed by Immanuel Kant. After had studied the edges and potentialities of human reason, describing its structure and nature, as well as the ways time and space relate to it, and the free will relate to judgement, choices, consequences, and universal principles of causes, Kant also reflected about how History as a transcendental phenomenon that moves beyond singular individuals should behave-occur along time. A reasonable subject should be able to improve its own life and world, so the world moving in time and space should necessarily be better afterwards. The everlasting collisions of plural individual's free will by means of intentional surplus of their choices and actions is little by little refined as more cohesive and possible events-phenomena. In other words, the ancient political animal should be able to be best tomorrow since we think, speak, communicate, and learn. Humankind inside time-space configured as History should necessarily develop itself and people. Time after time, events in the world should be better. Kant named those processes regarding History progress, predicating time qualitatively: as it goes, it becomes best.

There were few alternatives so Hegel could properly improve Kant's philosophy. It is not the case of arguing on how and if Hegel actually read Kant's works to actually produce his owns, proving actual reception processes. The supposition is rather based on major cultural phenomena shared in an age as we will further discuss. As a cultural readable background of scientific and philosophical production of knowledge, there were left to Hegel only a few options to unfold rational mechanisms of human life. Philosophically criticized by Kant, reason became Reason under the work of the Spirit and the State in Hegel's philosophy. It seemed necessary something reasonable should guide human action derived from free will and so many of its dissonant outcomes. The age was still too much far from being allowed and allowing disbelief in God and its effects. So until then, History and human affairs were still believed to be guided and organized by God or by a transcendental force akin to God. Believed real, God should be necessarily related to human reality effectuation in time and space. Being everywhere, pure potency and able of knowing everything, God's magnitude has to necessarily be updated in the world in human coefficients so human reality may not be destroyed. Power implies being able to happen and make happen; pure potency implies to happen anything anywhere when it may be the case. ${}^4$

However, the ways God acts sometimes are contradictory or seems to be, leading humankind to be still living under so many different conditions all over the world. Colonies, indigenous people, Europe civilization, war and progress seemed not so credible under God's power and benevolence. Should the original fall justify human sins of not creating a better world? Was this reasonable? Religious creation of humankind under the image and resemblance holy principle leads to subsequent human power and potency. A human-made Paradise seemed feasible and possible under reasonable historical processes. World's modern secularization never implied wholly disbelief in God or religion

Hans Blumenberg interestingly argued about the secularization processes of modern world towards contemporaneity. Some historians, philosophers, and social scientists worked on this phenomenon as well. Reinhart Koselleck's and Fernando Catroga's works may best represent the state of the art on studies about modern secularization. Their works describe and analyze history, discourses and institutions so we can properly understand those transformations. ${}^5$ However,

Blumenberg's works have the especial feature of focusing on cultural phenomena, their forms, and contents, their fundament and movement through History. The logical-tropical relations of metaphors and their histories make those processes possible to be understood as Blumenberg's proposed. His sincere admiration of Ernst Robert Curtius' works can be apprehended from his studies such as Paradigms for a Metaphorology and The Readability of the World. ${}^6$

In The Readability of the World, Hans Blumenberg offer us a history of metaphors by which world and reality could be read, from ancient times until the discovering of human genetic code in the 20 ${}^{th}$ century. In ancient times stars and bowels used to offer the possibility to foresee the future, presenting relations between things, phenomena and their signs, being understandable to human mind. In modern age stars started to become understandable as deploying new sort of forces over the human world, both above and below nature's fundamental intrinsic structures as physical world, a sort of new modern science's development derived from mystical-religious versions of former sublunary and supralunary worlds. Contemporaneously, reading the world and human beings has begun to demand perception of micro-structures in a broader sense, from physics to discourses and politics, stars left aside whether not under meteorological terms. ${}^7$

But in the Germanic principalities from late 18th century creativity and tradition were still important to guide the subjective drive stunned by wider phenomena under current development. New ways of understanding human reality started to emerge in order to allow best understandings of immediate social-historical world, which was undergoing a complexifying process from early 19 ${}^{th}$ century on. It felt necessary to make human world as steady as possible while reorienting it. American colonies' independence and French Revolution covered up for considerable time length the loud noise resounded by the liberal revolutions from the age as well as the one on process by means of working Indian cotton and weaving machines. "Proclamations of downfall do wonders, however, for the preservation of historically legitimated institutions. Scarcely a year after the republicanization of Rome, German Romanticism set out to rediscover the Middle Ages." ${}^8$ The loss of meaningful orientation to worldly human experience did not seem so much radical at the beginning as it would unfold itself almost one century later after Hegel's and Napoleon's deaths.

Amidst other understandings and despite possible contradictions, the Enlightenment's and the Romantic's cultures in the Germanic principalities from late ${18}^{\text{th}}$ and early ${19}^{\text{th}}$ centuries were still configured by intentions of retrieving or making evolve totalizing apprehensions of reality and consequent human experience. Aesthetics, ethics, history, and other representational -discursive phenomena claimed more complex and relational totalizing interfaces related to human world than the ${18}^{\text{th}}$ century encyclopedic endeavor. Reading the world in books and the Encyclopedia seemed no longer enough to let one know about the whole world phenomena. Despite of former recovering of Oriental and Ancient forms of culture, Europe persisted majorly catholic, especially because kingdoms were related to Church. That way, God persisted as the main solution to human problems and the fundament to all the books around the world already published or yet to come. The powerful background of those books provided by

God as The Bible – word derived from the Greek biblos, plural form for books – had still too much strength to affect life and culture, even though radical anthropological differences were prompting all over the world. The Bible represented all that must be in a book as all the possible books inside God's creation and the human world. The other books may not be enough to deal with life's problems. If not specifically as singular forms and contents, at least as human content to be unfolded by human life in a human world. From The Bible all the other histories should unfold. Under this intentional organizing vector, Novalis, Schlegel, Goethe, and Herder amongst others, challenged the human life and world's reading hegemony from traditional religious cultural backgrounds. However, Novalis is the main character to strictly and effectively articulate an idea of unique and absolute book, both by its referential and representational natures, that would be able to happen along human's lives unfolding phenomena. ${}^9$

It would then be no arbitrary linguistic gesture to use the word "Bible" for "the idea of an infinite book." Such a book could not be a means to some end, given its attribute of infinity. It would a "personified idea." In order to illustrate the unity of this book, Schlegel does not refer to the unifying principle of the biblical books but to the classical poems of the ancients. They form an inseparable organic whole-that is, "seen properly, One Poem, the only one in which poetry itself appears complete." In the highest form of literature, which we must once again envisage, "all books will be One Book" in like fashion. ${}^{10}$

As mentioned above, despite all the Germanic thinkers who had thought about a book or narrative that would reorganize human experience in History towards the future or final redemption, Novalis was the one that best articulated the Encyclopedia's enterprise in relation to biblical-historical teleology. He suggested the idea of a book pointing where to go.

A book as a path to read the modern world. Reading the book would suffice to read the world. Reading the book would be acting the world. This reading would enable possibilities of bringing back cohesiveness to human world after it had gotten so scattered by modern figuring out of old no more hidden novelties of existing peoples.

Then, for a moment that seems to combine sober insight with defiant genius, Novalis grasps the delusional aspect of the concept of the absolute book only to generalize precisely that as the new human standard: "The desire to write a Bible-is an inclination to madness that every capable person must have in order to be complete." In programmatic terms, we have here the prelude to the Romanticism to come: positing, in place of the ideal of the personality, the anonymous accumulation of creative powers that produced myths and fairy-tales, epics and songs in the same way that they make history – and that in Marx will even produce the technical inventions that enter "the open book of man's essential powers." All this had first been demonstrated in Friedrich August Wolf's dissolution of Homer into multiple blind bards. Authorship of the "absolute book" becomes the site for recasting the master plan of early Romanticism. The subject who will write the new Bible, the infinite novel, is just as undetermined as the subject who brings the world into being in "magical idealism." Hence the interchangeability of world and book. After all, it is this same subject who reads the absolute book and completes it through his reading, this creative transformation of Enlightenment "critique." ${}^{11}$

Making use of a metaphor based on the religious cultural content from the historical moment under concern, we may assume the sermon delivered by Hegel got secularized by Marx's catechism, which historically convert the unreachable in life into the pursue of a non-place. The kingdom of post-capitalist freedom mirrored original The Garden, so the end of labour could be correlated with wonders before the fall and original sin. Human disruptive dissociation from nature was an effect derived from alienation processes not yet finished and resulted from human knowledge, analogously to the banishing from The Garden. In order to restore this ideal condition, Communism should be reached. When not completed, the alienation process does not allow the human nature and being to find and be found by itself in a self-recognizing phenomenon which also creates the mind-soul's opening to beyond, otherness, and simultaneous integration to the whole as part of it. To know and to alter nature is part of evolutionarily human condition. Humans need to shelter, to eat, to reproduce the species.

In other words, we are all 'fallen', torn away from the natural state—that is our condition as self-conscious beings. However, for Hegel, that is not the end of the matter.

The story seems to imply that the first instinctive and natural state of life is the ideal. It appears to suggest the romantic view that our loss of 'innocence and harmony with nature', our exclusion from the garden, is a misfortune and hence also that the human condition of self-consciousness is a misfortune. But Hegel questions that interpretation. The human condition is one of division from nature and of self-division-a state of contradiction, a restless state, which creates its own drive to overcome it. As a result of our breach from nature, we are condemned to labour. But 'if it [labour] is the result of disunion it is also the victory over it'. For through working on the world we also come to objectify ourselves, to transform ourselves, to humanise our world and make ourselves at home in it. ${}^{12}$

The "science" of historical materialism has been confronted with the persistent problem of being originated from the established relations between Political Economy and philosophy of history, specifically built based on the natural sciences standards, principles, and methods from the age. Identifying dialectical processes to ontological ones as necessary occurrences in reality lead Marx's propositions derived from Hegel's philosophy to unsolvable contradictions, which follow from the doubtful denial of traditional philosophy by minimizing its functional importance until the simultaneous adoption of philosophy as theory and method. Despite the logical and procedural similarities between Saint Thomas Aquinas's reasoning method to philosophize and the Hegel-Marx's set of dialectics, there are differences between them that only further research will hereafter make clearest. However, the method of questioning by means of stating hypothetical ideas and advanced questions that may be contradictions, so one can reach conclusion and truth have been persistent from Aquinas to Marxist heritage of reasoning. The problem Aquinas was aware and apart from, that both Hegel and Marx worked differently, is the identification between things, phenomena, and reasoning processes. In other words, the problem of properly or not properly identifying metaphysics, ontology, and logics. ${}^{13}$

According to Thomas Aquinas, both logic and metaphysics are characterized by the same universal scope. The consideration of metaphysics extends to everything which is, as its subject is being insofar as it is being. And the science of logic too considers everything which is, not as it exists in reality but insofar as the whole of being falls under the consideration of reason. Because of the equivalence between the logical sphere of reason and the real sphere of being metaphysics has an affinity with logic.

This similarity is mentioned by Aquinas in order to explain the legitimate use of a logical mode of reasoning within metaphysics. Metaphysics is not identical with logic, but the modus logicus, the logical mode of reasoning, is to a certain extent useful for the philosopher in his inquiry into metaphysical matters. ${}^{14}$

Being and reason only coincide in a few occasions, but certainly not fully when history or social affairs are under consideration. The prognosis of future cannot wholly coincide with actual phenomena. History is beyond human life because it occurs under its own transcendental nature and as a condition of existence for human affairs. That said, socialism-communism cannot be unavoidable not only for the sake of human freedom, but also because would give up and release any form of human work or activity towards it. The final freedom from labour and capitalist constraints can only happen if considered as a final movement of alienation, preserving Idealism inside historical materialism. By means of necessary inner movements of contractions between social modes of production, communism should necessarily happen in the future. Human work and action towards it would not be necessarily, despite possible suffering of peasants and workers if forever not working or making any form of activity.

Marx did not await standing still for the coming of a specific future. He wrote the Communist Manifesto and promote political action using philosophy and ideology, which in his own terms, is derived from superstructures. So philosophy, even traditional ones, could still change the world. The changing power of philosophy had become to be associated exclusively to nature and its phenomena by means of scientific transforming action. Departing from Hegel and/or from Francis Bacon, depending on the philosophical perspective, Marx believed "the 'true community' of which the communist society is a case", would allow the laborers to be united and "self-consciously" able to use "natural laws to reform nature and society." This would be "the basic condition for the individual to gain freedom". ${}^{15}$

But the religious content persistent in the dialectical historical materialism developed by Marx was not fully original product from his own creation. Secularized by philosophical thought, this form of the transcendental derived from the religious had at least partial origins in considerations such as those by Immanuel Kant on reason's and ethics' outcomes through time and space as History. Progress should happen if reason exists and happens. According to Hegel's formulation, those processes should result from the dialectics of Reason, the Spirit, and the State, the secular phenomena of humans progressively choosing and acting better under organized collective conditions and forms.

It may be seen from the foregoing that in Hegel the concept of alienation is mystical and subjective. Since he takes Spirit as the primary point of departure, Hegel inverts all actual relations. The "Absolute Idea" alienating out of itself the world of Nature is simply the religious doctrine of creation in new dress. There is no such thing as an independent Idea of logic divorced from the human brain and the world of nature. But even more preposterous than the myth of God creating the world is that of the logical Idea being able suddenly to change itself in a trice into nature. Because his system demanded it, Hegel further held that alienation could be completely overcome and absolute freedom attained, which violates dialectics and arbitrarily places a determinate conclusion to the endless process of development of the world. This illustrates the conservative aspect of his philosophy. ${}^{16}$

Therefore, to deal with those problems presented by the relations between metaphysics, ontology, and logics, and later analyses of The Capital text, this work will be built under certain

Wittgenstein's assumptions. This study is basically built over the method of operating formal logics and philosophical text analysis over linguistic and cultural sources of knowledge. To do so, the following analyses throughout this text will be built mostly based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Considerations about language, discourse, linguistic phenomena, and culture will be straight referenced when and as needed. In order to justify the discussion and use of only a few initial statements by Wittgenstein, from the opening of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, we will take on Sir Bertrand Russell's cohesive and clear statements as they follow below.

In order to understand Mr. Wittgenstein's book, it is necessary to realize what is the problem with which he is concerned. In the part of his theory which deals with Symbolism he is concerned with the conditions which would have to be fulfilled by a logically perfect language. There are various problems as regards language. First, there is the problem what actually occurs in our minds when we use language with the intention of meaning something by it; this problem belongs to psychology. Secondly, there is the problem as to what is the relation subsisting between thoughts, words, or sentences, and that which they refer to or mean; this problem belongs to epistemology. Thirdly, there is the problem of using sentences so as to convey truth rather than falsehood; this belongs to the special sciences dealing with the subject-matter of the sentences in question. Fourthly, there is the question: what relation must one fact (such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other? This last is a logical question, and is the one with which Mr. Wittgenstein is concerned. ${}^{17}$

So, considering both the reflections made by Rudi Te Velde about Thomas Aquinas and Bertrand Russell's considerations on Wittgenstein's concerns, we will be supplied by the intellectual tools to understand how Marx's historical materialism confuses philosophy of history with Political Economy by means of operating Hegelian dialectics as both an ontological and a logical principle. That way, phenomena in reality is overlaid with logical reasoning and further considered as truth despite not being. This makes of ideology and politics-superstructure's features-the most valuable aspects of Marx's works. As we will verify in the next session, there several serious logical mistakes at the very beginning of The Capital, what makes sink his whole historical materialism endeavor as an identification of Political Economy and philosophy of history. In the background, the opening phenomena of cultural creativity made possible by classical heritage and philosophical tradition yet too much loaded by religious content, as we can see from Blumenberg's considerations on cultural developmental processes by means of metaphoric relations and interfaces. Where science or logics may not proceed proper, culture and speculation may help as wisdom flirting with knowledge.

To finish, Wittgenstein offer us the straight tools to hold reasoning out from logical mistakes when evaluating how Marx proceeded his thought connecting dialectical conclusions one after the other, from premises (theses) to subsequent reasoning-questioning (antitheses) until reaching in an end what should be a truth state of affairs about reality. If Marx's fails dialectically defining capitalist value and its fundamental unit, further conclusions may not be truth or considerable, making historical materialism a hypothesis, a theory, but not a truth reality of human phenomenon or a scientific law.

If things can occur in states of affairs, this possibility must be in them from the beginning.

(Nothing in the province of logic can be merely possible. Logic deals with every possibility and all possibilities are its facts.)

Just as we are quite unable to imagine spatial objects outside space or temporal objects outside time, so too there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others.

If I can imagine objects combined in states of affairs, I cannot imagine them excluded from the possibility of such combinations.

Things are independent in so far as they can occur in all possible situations, but this form of independence is a form of connexion with states of affairs, a form of dependence. (It is impossible for words to appear in two different roles: by themselves, and in propositions.)

If I know an object I also know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs.

(Every one of these possibilities must be part of the nature of the object.)

A new possibility cannot be discovered later. ${}^{18}$

In order to differentiate logics, reasoning as a sort of metaphysics fundamentally built on linguistic phenomena, and ontology, so truth could be thought and stated, Wittgenstein affirmed "the world is the totality of facts, not of things", being "all that is the case". This means only the world can be thought, because human reality is in the world. This case that makes "the world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts", all that matters under reasoning. A state of affairs implies a set of logical relations, where "the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case". "Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same", since not under consideration and persisting being only itself in the world. However, to no lose the grip over reality, closing relations to ontology and actual truth in the world, Wittgenstein closes this logical circularity stating that "a state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things)", making sure logical things are in objects under certain aspects and dimensions, because "it is essential to things that they should be possible constituents of states of affairs" in order to be truly understood. So, considering "the facts in logical space are the world", which has to be divided "into facts" so things can be truly understood under their specificities, detaching themselves from the continuum of everything else that truly exists, "the case-a fact-is the existence of states of affairs", of logical relations that represent reality in a specific way. "In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state of affairs, the possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the thing itself. It would seem to be a sort of accident, if it turned out that a situation would fit a thing that could already exist entirely on its own". ${}^{19}$

I the next session we will evaluate if the commodity is the capitalist minimum unit of value under specific and proper capitalist form, allowing to think Marx's version of Capitalism and his philosophy of history, their truth or not, and if exchange truly makes the specific form of creating capitalist value.

II. ALIENATION, IDEALISM, HISTORY, TRADE AND VALUE

From now on we will proceed with the criticism of Marx's ideas based on philosophical analysis of his texts, most from The Capital, by means of performing logical analysis of it. For practical reasons of textual length, we will consider only the first pages of The Capital Book I, Capitalist Production, first part, Commodities and Money, chapter first, Commodities, especially the first section, The two factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value (the substance of Value and the magnitude of Value). This analysis of The Capital supposes that the flaws observed by the fore-analyzed set of statements can only generate successive sequences of logical failures not allowing thus to obtain a true understanding of the world and human reality. The small logics mistakes can only derive more mistakes since Marx's organize his texts based on dialectical methodological movements scaling up his arguments under successive sequential connections of theses, antitheses and syntheses, derived one set after the other, until so wide conclusions as it became his philosophy of history can be generalized. Those mistakes become serious because of his resourcing of dialectics as method and ontological principle, derived from Hegel's works.

Considering the theoretical aspect of Marx's works under consideration, we must inform Hegel's Science of Logic established the fundamentals of dialectical method and its supposed necessary ontological relation that allows the understanding of the ways human nature unfold itself in and trough the world. "In setting out the three great laws of dialectics, Engels pointed out that the law of contradiction occupies the entire second portion of Hegel's Science of Logic, which is moreover the most important section – the Doctrine of Essence [Dialectics of Nature]." For Hegel, "the realm of essence is also the realm of manifest contradiction, of contradictions latent within 'being'." This means what is exterior, alien to essence is an opposition because does not belong into what something or one are. This makes the Doctrine of Essence in the Science of Logic to be fundamental to the law of contradiction. ${}^{20}$

In Hegel's and Marx's works we can find several formal and/or informal references to authors and philosophical theories derived from ancient times, such as Aristotle or Goethe. Traditional philosophy and forms of knowledge had never lost value for them and their worlds. The core problem was rather the philosophy and forms of knowledge at the age had most lost straight or direct function to their worlds' such urgent and latent problems of effective reality and everyday life. Reflections on transcendence or the mystical-religious aspect of human reality and ontological-metaphysical questions, despite of still being important and frequent amongst philosophers and intellectuals of the time, could not answer anymore the new industrial and liberal civil societies' concerns just emerging. The social-political context that would make Marx affirm philosophy's misery suggested that dialectically, those contradictions could require new adjustments of human forces in order to solve them into an effective historical synthesis, which could situate the world into a new starting pointing towards the future. However, after Hegel's death in 1831, "due to Germany's political and economic development and that of the struggle between the bourgeois and feudal forces, Hegel's philosophy thanks to its internal contradictions," split into "the Old Hegelian school (the Right Hegelians) and the Young Hegelian school (Left Hegelians). The Old Hegelians leaned toward conservatism, emphasizing the Hegelian system; the Young Hegelians were progressive, emphasizing the Hegelian method". Notwithstanding this historical division and judgements from his critical heritage, Karl Marx belonged to both as recorded in his whole work. According to Wang Ruoshui, "the 'true socialists' emerged under the influence of Hess." ${}^{21}$

In The Poverty of Philosophy, The German Ideology, Theses on Feuerbach, as well as the Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 and the Selected writings in sociology & social philosophy, Marx establishes main principles and conceptions of his historical materialistic philosophy of history based on dialectics, also present within and along The Capital. ${}^{22}$ The Manifesto of the Communist Party is his work that fully belongs to superstructure phenomena, aiming to change workers immediate lives by politics means. Being revolutionary does not deny propaganda, education, and politics belongs to something else than social-productive phenomena of the base. Causing, conditioning, and/or determining do not imply the nature of the state of affairs under Marx and our considerations are other than derived and belonging to superstructure. The Manifesto of the Communist Party aims to direct and to condition our comprehension about historical phenomena, how they flow, and their directions towards a determined future, shaping human actions according to it. ${}^{23}$

The problem becomes more severe in The Capital, since Marx's philosophy of history supposes industrial capitalism's nature as the resulting synthesis from feudal social production relations overcame into bourgeois society. In The Capital Marx was describing industrial capitalism inner constituents and functioning processes. However, alienation as materialization of ideas into objects is human activity outcome by its own nature. Work is another form of it. Commodities cannot be judged cornerstone to capitalism under historical materialism unless we subvert the concept of value as being majorly composed by exchange value, even though pre-capitalist commerce also had produced it. Being exchange value the soul of the commodities, commerce cannot be left out of capitalism phenomenal engine. The problem is if surplus is mostly produced by commodities circulation or production from wage-paid labour. We should ask how differently radical is producing cogwheels, garments, and machines, from collecting goods in a country and selling in another. Is the labour in question paid to the workers? Initial value of the good was lesser than its final version? Sugar and dried pepper are capitalist commodities if sold into the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in the ${17}^{\text{th}}$ century? Fundamentally commercial and/or transactional, capitalist alienation of work's value happens by taking away workers produced objects apart from themselves, in a second degree movement of making a subjects' idea external-alien to himself.

"Feuerbach's humanism is fundamentally materialist, for he sees man as a part of nature," as Marx also did in order to justify human right to survival by means of reproducing its own life producing goods that would fulfill this purpose. "Feuerbach's materialism was, however, intuitive, not thoroughgoing. He noted the need to observe man in terms of his relationship with nature, but not in terms of his relationship with society." This lead Marx to think those questions raised by Feuerbach and Hegel, about the fundamental phenomenon of alienation, under the industrial contemporary society conditions of his time. As Feuerbach had done before, "as soon as the realm of social history was touched on, he fell back into idealism," i.e., as it has been argued, this also happened to Marx while allegedly inverting Idealism into historical materialism. ${}^{24}$

It is by means of alienation processes and phenomena that humans create value. Human ideas transform original things into secondary ones, aggregating qualities to those original things. This second degree of qualities applied on things by working them through creative action is the source of anthropological and social value. Wool only naturally "wear" the sheep. There are abundant bibliography revising historical materialism, Marx's works and the related theoretical-methodological approach used by him and the subsequent tradition, but the perspective adopted here is rather different. It will not be considered on first hand that Marx's theories are or can true because they were built under systemic fashion and logics. Marx's theories were meant to one and whole uniform set in front of the human rational understanding action. ${}^{25}$

Once we set down this philosophical background which has to be considered along and articulated to the cultural background from world's and Germany's historical conditions from late ${18}^{\text{th}}$ and early ${19}^{\text{th}}$ centuries, still considerable religious, as we have seen before, we will proceed logically analyzing Marx's text in The Capital, so later may be clearer that the following logical flaws have huge effects on Marx's philosophy of history, making it unsuitable to be truth about human affairs and world's reality. The secularization process in progress in the age were still too much charged by traditional-religious background, subsequently translated to philosophies of history and metaphysics of human world, which anyhow, had to be considered in relation to and answer human questions from the moment, mostly related to social-cultural changes caused by the crash of Old Regime, the uprising of several liberal revolutions and the development of modern-contemporary industrial forms of production.

Thus, Marx begins The Capital with an analysis of the commodity taken as the fundamental form of value production in order to synthesize the necessary character of socialism-communism advent. When stating "the wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as 'an immense accumulation of commodities,' its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity," Marx proceeds similarly to Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, who built his political theory starting from the senses and related physics, as minimal units of human reality in a world ruled by God and political common-wealth, so discourse could be fully justified from its minimum parts until general conclusions. Trying to develop his own philosophy of history and revision of classic Political Economy, Marx started his attempt to justify human labour value inside capitalism under the same analytical rule, from parts to the whole. His effort starts arguing how there was a specific form of capitalist value created from nature-based values and subsequent objectified ideas transformed by capitalist forms of work. As it is known, he believed the total social amount of value had been historically taken out from workers by means of historically determined social modes of production. ${}^{26}$

According to Marx, the wealth in majorly capitalist societies is presented under the specific form of all the commodities configured as the set of produced things. Commodity is the singular unitary fundamental form of value so value can be produced and accumulated under the form of wealth. According to this logics, capitalist wealth presents itself as capital. As a first argument, he states his "investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity", i.e., a dialectical thesis logical moment, a first idea to be investigated. "A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another." Commodities can be related to hunger necessities or intellectual ones, they can be objects that satisfy direct needs-wants, "directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production." Further, Marx emphasizes the importance of criteria by means and rule of which objects can be useful, endowed with value, so later he can argue on the ways exchanging is done. The problem starts to be unfold by the point of view of equalizing processes social-historically ruled by conventions or the intrinsic value of objects relating to their own natures. No matter the social mode of production, in a minimum degree, all them require to consider exchange asks for knowing objects own natures. ${}^{27}$

So why is the capitalist form specific? Marx follows ahead arguing "utility of a thing makes it a use-value", although this use-value does not exist out of the physical materiality of things which are going to become commodities. Things are useful and use-value because they have specific qualities independent of being transformed by human work. Marx insists "use-values become a reality only by use or consumption," reaffirming Hegel's concept of alienation. And performing an anticipated logical movement of antithesis, he affirms use-values are "the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value." This starts the dialectical movement of subsuming by identification the concept of exchange value under/to an absolute concept of value, as if they were equivalent and superior to use-value, even though use-value is the necessary fundament of any value phenomena under consideration in his work. ${}^{28}$

After explaining use-value has to be considered by quantity and quality, Marx develops his arguments preliminarily defining the concept of exchange value in terms of quality-quantity, affirming "exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms." Making use of his dialectics, in order to achieve successive syntheses, Marx invite us to "consider the matter a little more closely." However, most of what follows are examples based on content, things, that should fulfill mathematical relations not necessarily exemplary to his own arguments. At this point of his initial theoretical movement, it is more decisive to consider how he tries to differentiate and conceptualize use-value and exchange value instead of considering his examples of traditional historical commodities. If for use-value he stated: "So also is the establishment of socially recognised standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly in convention;" for exchange value he wrote: "Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place," deriving through another axis of reflection that "an intrinsic value", inner to the thing own reality similar to what happens to use-value, could be "an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities," that despite seeming "a contradiction in terms" should be solved by dialectical thinking; so he could finally state a presupposed truth for both forms of value, that: "To discover the various use of things is the work of history;" and therefore, historical materialism was intrinsically woven into his Political Economy revision in The Capital. ${}^{29}$

Despite of further Marxism's critical heritage about pre-capitalist forms of social-production, at this point of his arguing, Marx defines capitalism as an essentially commercial form of production, recording that things are exchanged by values expressed in equal relations, and that "exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it." Sentences like "the use-values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge of commodities," reinforce interpretations that capitalism is a further development beyond commercial forms of production, mostly usually identified to mercantilism or previous forms of production and value creation, hence exchange value is considered the capitalist form of value in absolute terms. Marx suspending abstracts (aufheben) the strict concept of value when affirming that in exchange relations "there exists in equal quantities something common to both" things under exchanging. Despite affirming "exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it," these conclusions are not equivalent to affirm exchange value is the determinant ontological and metaphysical form of the strict concept of value itself. In Marx's works, value is analytically broke into two constituent sub-forms, use and exchange. The symbolic form of value in its monetary form is not enough to solve the problems he had under consideration. Neither does help using geometrical examples of triangles since calculating areas and diagonals are not equivalent of exchanging goods. Coal and gold values are historically determined under social forms and geometrical relations follow strict permanent rules. The common something that allows a rational agreed exchange action is necessarily the utility or social valorization of a thing. The utility of wool, coal, or iron are exchanged according to historical relations of equalizing value strict sense, which must be in a common equivalent relation at a moment. However, what makes a thing use-value will always define the dropping side of the scale. Only under hypothetical apocalyptic conditions use-value could be fully reconfigured in a non-historical form, allowing exchange value to be the actual form of value, hence food is more important and necessary to survival than gold. ${}^{30}$

Marx's next steps is based on suggesting rational abstract procedures as ways to judge value. He states value under its exchange value is the "common 'something'" to things to be trade. According to him, this something common cannot be natural properties of things, but rather labour accumulated over time. This happens so he can affirm the beginnings of his philosophy of history inside The Capital, aiming to convince History is guided by a vector meaning of human affairs towards overcoming social modes of production towards socialism-communism. When he states a use-value is as valuable as any other if they exist in equational balanced quantities between themselves, he does not argue such equalizations never played in favor of wheat when compared to diamonds or steam machines. The underlying question is how much wheat is necessary to exchange and pay a locomotive, not otherwise. Marx's suspension of use-value is not enough to solve the antithesis proposed by himself. The statement "as use-values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use-value," does not find answer in his own factual examples. No rational being exchanges abstract numbers, suspended of use-value and real effectivity towards survival. Marx affirmed "along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract." Historically, even Soviet Union had to further choose between promoting agriculture or industry. ${}^{31}$

Contradictorily, Marx stated the importance of the Idea when reassuring primary alienation as the second criteria of value creation, affirming "when looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they [forms of work embodied in commodities] are-Values," denying however the use-value once more, in order to identify by subsumption, "Value" to exchange value. That way, transforming ideas and raw material into something else by means of work. The core of producing value is still this transformational process. If "such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use-values," and "the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use-value," we have to face an unsolvable logical and phenomenic contradiction, implying there will not exist a theoretical synthesis for Marx's theory after all. His derivation of value creation mostly by labour is the before mentioned movement of weaving philosophy of history into his revision of Political Economy. ${}^{32}$ On this point, he starts another dialectical movement offering another thesis-synthesis of his own intellectual movement, unveiling his thoughts and method while summarizing his arguments, as we can be observed although The capital pages.

We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use-value. But if we abstract from their use-value, there remains their Value as defined above. Therefore, the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange value of commodities, whenever they are exchanged, is their value. The progress of our investigation will show that exchange value is the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itself or be expressed. For the present, however, we have to consider the nature of value independently of this, its form.

A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labour, contained in the article. The quantity of labour, however, is measured by its duration, and labour time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours. ${}^{33}$

Before initiating the second section, Marx obfuscate us with intrinsically contradictory reflections, which cannot be sustained under detailed critical-logical analysis. The logical analysis to be proceeded from here on is only one of possible many others to be performed from The Capital's pages. Let us analyze the following logical structure between the sentences: (1) "Lastly, nothing can have value, without being an object of utility;" (2) "The utility of a thing makes it a use-value;" but the logical-philosophical sequence of sentences only gets concluded at the end of first section with (3) "A thing can be a use-value, without having value." This logical contradiction accepts only a few limited solutions, but the synthesis-conclusion that "Value", absolute "value" is fundamentally exchange value does not sustain itself faced to the contradiction that: (1b) all the useful things are endowed with value; from what follows (2b) a useful thing is use-value; from what cannot be concluded that (3b) a thing can be useful without being and/or being endowed with value. The logical sequence and their relations do not follow true under reasoning. If we accept them and their possible conclusions/consequences, we must be aware that the reasoning outcome will exist only in the opinion realm of mental activities. At the beginning of first section, The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value [absolute concept](The Substance of Value [possibly use-value] and the Magnitude of Value [possibly exchange value]), Marx affirms "being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it [the utility of a thing or use-value] has no existence apart from that commodity," so the commodity and use-value are associated by identification. A commodity needs to be/have use-value because the commodity is subsequent to use-value and to physical characteristics derived from raw material or use-value. It is the raw material materiality or use-value that condition the commodity, not otherwise. ${}^{34}$

Marx's labyrinth-simultaneously Theseus and Minotaur-, is both the trap and the hero's redemption. Even recovering his own dialectical initial theses, the syntheses do not sustain themselves. This is effect of Marx's explicit effort to honestly answer real and effective problems from his own time and world. However, his inversion of Idealism is not real or truth. He stated sentences about use-value related to alienation processes that in Hegel's works are related the animals' conditions: "use-values become a reality only by use or consumption". Hegel affirmed the difference of animals' and human alienation processes based on their capacities to preserve the alienating synthesis or not. Humans are supposed to be able to sustain their alienating outcomes under objectified forms or not. It only seems an inversion of Idealism towards historical materialism. And, to be fair, since dialectical, Marx was also worried about the logical mode of his thinking when trying to somehow specify useful qualities are qualities to human life. ${}^{35}$ So we can proceed, Marx also bequeathed us more straight linguistic contradictions such as the one which follows. The diamond example given by himself is contrary to his own thinking if we consider what follows stated below. The time to produce diamonds from coal would be in nature or by human work, not possible to be equalized to any other product based on labour-time.

Commodities, therefore, in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value. The value of one commodity is to the value of any other, as the labour-time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the production of the other. ${}^{36}$

Dialectically, Marx initiates the third section based on the presupposed synthesis taken as thesis to be examined along next pages of The Capital. However, it is important to notice that under this dialectical method, its reflexive-argumentative terms presuppose the thesis is an initial idea-hypothesis, the antithesis is an open hypothesis with contradictory consequences and ideas, which follow logical relations, and the synthesis is a sort of conclusion that may allow further reasoning and logical movements. Under the title The Form of Value or Exchange Value, Marx verifies and tries to rectify the general line of his arguments based on one more dialectical movement.

The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition. Turn and examine a single commodity, by itself, as we will. Yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it. If, however, we bear in mind that the value of commodities has a purely social reality, and that they acquire this reality only in so far as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., human labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity. In fact we started from exchange value, or the exchange relation of commodities, in order to get at the value that lies hidden behind it. We must now return to this form under which value first appeared to us. ${}^{37}$

Subsuming Value, i.e., absolute value, to exchange value, in order to justify the allegedly relations between his criticism on classical Political Economy and his philosophy of history, especially from the point of view of capitalist modern-contemporary societies, Marx clearly manifests his not inverted Idealism, abandoning historical materialism allegedly inversion of it, when stating sentences like those above. In Marx, only human mind and experience can historically endow value to things, no matter if they come from mental human necessities or from body survival. Those equations relating to value, use-value, and exchange value are not sustained either to justify his philosophy of history or as truth about basic capitalist mechanisms and constituents. Value comes out from primary alienation caused by human strangeness over and about nature, from the acknowledgement-and thus, from the spirit activity over the material manifestations of the Idea-of the intrinsic qualities embodied in things and nature. Value can also appear from secondary alienation caused by human work and activity in anthropological sense, wherever the social mode of production under consideration. Exchange value only maximizes value, therefore, only creates value from densification and consolidation processes that may create value through optimizing or concentration-rationalizing logics.

It is not an error to affirm capital is the social form of wealth under capitalism. In the end, Marx's capitalism is commercial by nature and industrial by anthropological condition. However, subsuming under and/or identifying exchange value to absolute value is a logical mistake with serious philosophical and theoretical consequences.

III. CONCLUSION

In his works, Marx frequently subsumes alienation as the original work to create value under the category of socially codified labour in order to justify the attempted theoretical-conceptual connection between his historical materialist philosophy of history and his analyses of proper capitalism's social-economic mechanisms. The world Marx is concerned about is the one on the happening of industrial novelties and outcomes, a world that just and barely crossed structural thresholds out of medieval-modern conditions, habits, cultures, and believes. Throughout successive and incessant dialectical movements along The Capital pages, Marx's discourse lost potential towards truth. His theories do not compose an uniform whole. If there may be there a lot of truth about capitalism's inner mechanisms, the same does not happen to his disguised philosophy of history woven in descriptions of how modes of production would allegedly overcome each other by necessary historical law. ${}^{38}$

It is also said that Marx never again used the idea of alienation in later periods, and it is argued from this that the idea should be jettisoned. Some theorists also try to show that because Marx later gave up the concept, the old Marx did not measure up to the young Marx.

Both views are mistaken. In fact, in Capital, the most important work of his career, alienation remains a major theme of study. After gaining the historical materialist outlook, Marx devoted his efforts to the study of this problem: how should the basic outlook of historical materialism be applied to the anatomy of capitalist society and economy? In capitalist society, what is the concrete process of alienation of labor? How are the worker's products expropriated? Marx used the theory of surplus value to answer this. ${}^{39}$

The making of a thing-in-nature into something else, thus acquiring distinct qualities of the original thing is alienation as an intrinsic first instance anthropological feature of human potential to activity. The right to use the created thing-and, therefore, aggregated value-is a fundamental categorical human prerogative. When the creator loses the usufruct and/or property of the created object, the creator is alienated from the object in a second degree of alienation phenomena. The idea that conformed the object becomes material and is no more only in the creator's mind. When historical materialism got created, Western European social institutions were already sufficiently determined by and in History, so became possible to exponentially alienate value under not majorly and strictly juridical forms bequeathed by tradition and customary law. The problem was not strictly the right to property and alienation on individual level, but rather an intensification of those logics under new forms and values.

If there is any true intentional direction in Marx's assumptions about capitalism, it is that capitalism's essence might be commerce and trade. The difficult problem here is that alienating value from workers happens under the industrial standard of paying wages in exchange for value created by labour. The human anthropological nature of creating and accumulating value by means of producing something is only orthogonally realized in capitalism as such: the exchange, the trade happens between capitalists and workers, intensifying alienation in all terms. Only this way creating becomes the soul of capitalism. Exchanging is the capitalism engine, its driven force.

Those questions have been worked and consolidated in discussions about the theoretical edges relating to capitalist value concentration logics and processes, from primitive accumulation to most advanced forms such as those under industrial capitalism. Those processes were considered to be related to their own superstructure expressions. This has been understood as the specific historical beginnings of capitalism according to the tradition derived from Marx's works and ideas. Some interpretations state capitalism could not had been risen because only industry and paid work could lead to specific forms of capitalism production, societies, and value accumulation. Marx's answer has its core on paid work and labour-time, requiring civil liberal forms of society. Marx's capitalism, i.e., industrial capitalism, required concentration value by means of work alienated by time, creating the contradiction of a Hegelian alienation process where humankind found itself alienated not in or face to nature, but rather into liberal industrial societies, not recognizing itself anymore.

In the end, Marx's theses about commodities, value, use-value, and exchange value have to be faced to the alienation processes, so no matter the existing things we may take under consideration and work/activity can be conformed as an useful object that might relate humans to life and the world. The being, i.e., all that exists, must be conformed by the idea and the spirit. Value has to become capital, the modern-contemporary form of wealth. The raw material has to be moved towards human reality so it can be useful and become value. When one recognizes the stone's qualities that may turn it into a spearhead, human thought performs dialectics while alienating itself from itself, so the events following the transformative action can be recovered as power over the outcome and simultaneous acknowledgement of the difference between oneself, its actions, and the world under potential human condition. Alienation makes somehow human what is nature or not human, creating difference and value.

Regarding Marx's philosophy of history, we can assert capitalism may fall one day, however, this fall is not necessary by any historical law and the outcome may be anything else but those forms of socialism-communism Marx and his contemporaries predicted. History will unfold the intentional surplus derived from human choices and actions so something one day may change. Historical materialism allegedly inversion of Idealism cannot be sustained after all. If Marx intended to reach the truth about capitalism and its further future transformative unfolding outcome as a more developed society and form of social production, his theoretical-dialectical conclusions should not had started from value as it had been.

Marx's target appears to be Hegel's idealism; but he has not got this clearly in his sights. It is true that, for Hegel, economic labour is not the highest stage of spirit's development. This continues further through art, religion and philosophy. These higher activities do not supersede labour, they supplement it. However, Marx is in no position to criticise these ideas, since he holds similar views himself. For Marx, too, believes that art and philosophy (if not religion) constitute a higher 'realm of freedom' and a higher sphere of human development. This is a direct descendant of the Hegelian view, as I have been arguing. ${}^{40}$

Between the alienating process of creating value and the advent of a new mode of social production, which would free humankind from work, there is an ontological-dialectical phenomenon that makes not feasible this endeavor in its very own beginnings. The dialectical freedom depends on alienation and conduces human beings to similar states of nature conditions in the end. To dialectically promote the final sublimation of the Spirit implies to return at the Absolut Idea, from which human beings would necessarily need to alienate themselves again in another form of nature. In this hypothetical, logical-historical stage of development humans would lose part of their own humanity, been required to recover it by means of creative actions, activities and work. "Overcoming alienation therefore means to return to the individual as the starting point." ${}^{41}$

First, alienation is a monistic concept, one which recognizes that the universe has only one foundation or origin, and due to the development within this basis of self-contradiction it generates its opposite from within (one divides into two), creating the opposition of matter and spirit. The idea of alienation does away with the view of thought and existence as disjunct, parallel things, and argues that no matter how inimical they may appear, one is always derived from the other, is a transformation of the other. If idealism made nature into the alienation of the Idea, there was nothing to stop materialism adopting the concept and, adjusting the relationship between them, making man into the alienation of nature. For Hegel, because the Idea is taken as the point of departure, the development from Nature to man is not alienation but sublation of it, i.e., the return to itself of the Idea. Since dialectical materialism takes nature, matter as point of departure, we should recognize that Spirit is in the first place alienated out of Matter, Man is alienated out of Nature. Of course, given the premise that we recognize the primacy of matter and secondariness of spirit, we do recognize in a sense that there is a process of alienation of matter to spirit. ${}^{42}$

Thus, Marx's socioeconomic reflections on latter industrial capitalism, his critical revision on Political Economy, his revolutionary work ideology, and his dialectical historical materialist philosophy of history are distinct parts of his works that not necessarily fits each other without incongruences and mistakes. Here, ideology should be understood as both a superstructure effect-phenomenon and as a sort of justified wisdom derived from scientific knowledge surplus, as proposed by Clifford Geertz. The wisdom and knowledge that guide action is no less important because existing beyond justification and constituting ideology. The sociocultural and political forms expressed by a determined social mode of production also determined Marx's own revolutionary conceptions. Somehow, the strong Hegelian elements of his works even reaches the edges of religion from his time. This culture updating subjects through historical time. Work as anthropological condition is culture anyhow. The interesting manifest ideologically – according to Geertz theory and concept of it – built in order help improving people's lives and material conditions does not allow or justify the denial of major theoretical errors his theories may bring along. Marx was a subject from an age when science was considered to be necessarily able to give truth, proper, and right answers about the world. The knowledge surplus derived by ideological phenomena was still configured as being derived from the struggle of opinions. His world was awaiting sort of a final word on some questions. The European religious heritage, tradition, and cultural background was still strongly effective and able to offer options of final words on a few matters. ${}^{43}$ Ruoshui reflected about the supposed inversion of Idealism and the displacement occurred to religion regarding its fundamental function in Hegel's philosophy while considering Feuerbach:

Religion is the alienation of man's essence. Man projects his essence out of himself, and, creating god in his own image, transforms him into an independent subject, claiming that God has created man in his own image. An inversion is thus brought about of the relationship between God and Man, and the product of man's brain rules over man himself.

The essence of man is the human "species." Individual humans are limited, imperfect, impotent; only in the "species" can man cast off these limitations. In religion, man by alienation changes this "species" into God. God has the perfection of the "species": he is limitless, perfect, omnipotent. Man looks upon his own essence as something otherworldly. God's essence is nothing but the essence of man: cleansed, rid of human limitations, i.e., of the essence of actual, corporeal man; objectified, i.e., seen and treated as an otherworldly, independent essence and so worshipped. Hence all formulations of God's essence are attributes of human nature [cf. EC: 14].

What is human nature, man's "humanity"? What things are common to all men? They are Reason, Will, and Love [cf. EC: 3]. These human characteristics are again precisely what pertain to God. Whatever man thinks and proposes, God likewise thinks and proposes. The consciousness of God is man's self-consciousness, although the believer has no direct awareness of this. The believer claims: God is love. This simply means that love is higher than anything else. But since man has endowed God with his own essence, he himself is impoverished. "To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing" [EC: 25]. ${}^{44}$

So, it is not out of reason and purpose to recover some of Marx's own reflections about religion written in The Capital. His book has plenty of religious references, discussions and allusions:

This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property. M. Thiers, e.g., had the assurance to repeat it with all the solemnity of a statesman, to the French people, once so spirituel. But as soon as the question of property crops up, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the intellectual food of the infant as the one thing fit for all ages and for all stages of development. In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and "labour" were from all time the sole means of enrichment, the present year of course always excepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic. ${}^{45}$

Industrial modern-contemporary Europe asked for another sort of explanation about how humankind had reached such a tragic condition on the verge of its own success. Reason seemed not to guide human beings properly anymore. Something seemed inadequate and religious words sufficed no more. Old centuries of rural communal ways of life under customary and natural laws could not be found in the industrial world society. Technology wrong-paced ethical-moral development along and through History. "So something like this transpired in the 19 ${}^{th}$ century, for thinkers like Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, when philosophy ceased to be fundamentally metaphysical and took an 'anthropological' turn – a turn that was also political, social and cultural." "Issues pertaining to the quality of human life became central", leading from questioning "matters of 'what we can know'", mostly related to ontological and/or metaphysical problems, to questions "of what we can (and can best) become," i.e., questions only expected to be answered by science. ${}^{46}$ However, in this work we have intentionally based our insights and reflections on Hans Blumenberg's accounts on metaphorical displacements and movements through cultural experience and life that allows intellectual creativity, looking for to reflect on how science may be deeply culturally biased. Meaning historically moves itself in, by means of, and through metaphorical relations every time the edges of reality become so strictly static that shards of old forms of experience persist any way. "The traces lead us back to where wishes took shape and struck root, and from there through the guises and disguises of their traditions." ${}^{47}$

These questions, which could be multiplied at will, remind us of what we had almost forgotten. They run counter to all criteria of what can be known and is deemed worth knowing; superseded and made redundant by progress, they still lie deeply embedded in all scientific results. "Metaphorology" is a method for recovering the traces of such wishes and expectations, which do not have to be "repressed" to justify our interest in them. [...] The magnitude of history is not constituted by the sheer multitude of years or centuries. The obstinacy with which some things return and metamorphose is more thought-provoking than the constancy with which others simply linger. But the danger of being deluded by what returns and releases its energetic charge for the opportune historical moment is also in play: what can only ever be a corrective of the respective present then appears as a tangible future. ${}^{48}$

In Marx's works, the religious cultural background and subsequent metaphorical relations opened up the author's intellectual perceptions to creative ways of explaining an urgent fast changing new world. Despite of the logical mistakes analyzed before and the criticism on how he insufficiently tried to articulate his Political Economy to his own philosophy of history, his works have huge value. The logical mode structured in his statements does not allow us to accept as true some of his propositions. For those subjects back in Marx's age, it was an important task "to break history into two and not just" chronologically, as others had done. They presupposed new forms of systematically interpreting the world would create something analogous to a "religion [explanation or theory, with which] begins a new world history." "It was the imitation of an imitation, however: the French Revolution had already given the calendar a new beginning, and there was no other way to compete than to repeat the slogan that everything will be new and restart the clock". Late ${18}^{\text{th}}$ and early ${19}^{\text{th}}$ centuries were the loci when new discourses sprung in order to explain the then deficit of humankind integrative sociocultural nature and forms of life. ${}^{49}$