Marxism: Criticism and/or Action

Y e have to go back to the witch doctors or the Shakespeare of Hamlet or Macbeth to reach a world in which specters, abstract beings, names come to life, “objective powers” play so large a part as they do in the world of Marx—from that “mysterious thing,” the commodity, which floats in the shadow of the physical products of modern industry, to those “personifications of economic relations,” the social classes, which, according to Capital, are the protagonists of the political-economic drama. Each of these entities, in one of Marx’s most characteristic phrases, “takes on an independent existence over [and] against the individuals” and dominates human behavi...