In Intellectual and Manual Labour (1970), Sohn-Rethel argues that Kant’s transcendental subject formally resembles exchange abstraction. Because Kant defines the subject as time, capitalism operates on a Kantian subject driven by pure temporality; wage workers rent out labour time in exchange for abstract value expressed through monetary price. True, capital is the product of pure abstraction – surplus value, and the latter grows exponentially with the elimination of any materiality, certainly commodity, including wage labour as commodity. M-C-M turns into M-M’, Marx said it himself (he needs no corrections here by the “post-Marxists”). However, this creates a contradiction that cannot be “sublated” as this is the question of real vs. (human) transcendental – the final contradiction.

Transcendental (or abstraction) is necessary but ought to submit to the real (of material, physical reality be it “natural” or “artificial”). This is why this is a resolution of a contradiction rather than sublation – it is a fallacy to assume that “hallucinations” (Marx) of a philosophical mind are anything other than human activity, whereas ontological reality remains beyond its grasp. That is why dialectics remains a method, not ontology: how we learn of the world is not the same as the world itself.

At the expense of the holokaustos (the Greek sacrificial practice of destruction of flesh through fire) of all physical, the presumably self-standing abstraction of Value lives on. This purely philosophical postulate cannot sustain itself as the real(ity), explains Marx in Vol. III of Capital, and the contradiction it stands on is ontologically untenable. Dialectics, on the other hand, is a procedure of inquiry which is carried out more similarly to Kant’s critique than Hegel’s mystifying ontologisation of what is essentially a method of cognition.

Katarina Kolozova is a philosopher working in the areas of non-standard philosophy, materialist theory, and Marxian studies. She is a professor at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje, and a founding member and co-director of the School of Materialist Research (SMR). She serves as a visiting professor at Arizona State University (Center for Philosophical Technologies) and is an affiliated professor at TU Vienna (Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics). Her publications include Defending Materialism (co-authored, Bloomsbury, 2024), Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals (Bloomsbury, 2019), Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism (Punctum, 2015), and Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2014). She was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley (Department of Rhetoric).