This is the first of a three-part series exploring Karl Marx’s method and philosophy. Separating Marx’s method into pieces is risky because they are inseparable. However, I think to provide a clear introduction, dividing the subject into three different essays will help. I will cover social ontology, historical materialism, and the dialectic—starting now with Marx’s social ontology, which remains an overlooked foundation of Marx’s broader method.
Unlike my other series, Marx in Surplus are longer pieces—although my aim is still to provide a mostly jargon-free, introductory read.
“Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.”—Lukács
Most introductions to Marx present his conclusions first; for example, we might receive a primer on the conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. These punchy anecdotes are useful for constructing catchy slogans, but not for building an understanding of how Marx arrived at these conclusions; that is, his method and philosophy are omitted. This omission strips away the enduring revolutionary potential found in Marx’s work, while also removing helpful context that can clear up some confusion that first-time readers may experience when encountering him.
I emphasize ‘some’ of the confusion because polemical jabs and historical references clutter Marx’s work, thickening an already dense prose. Beyond these hurdles, Bertell Ollman also points out that Marx’s language reflects how he conceptualized the forms and categories he was examining. Marx’s social ontology—his view of what constitutes the social world—is relational and processual, emphasizing fluidity rather than fixity. This is what led to the famous statement by Vilfredo Pareto that Ollman references in his opening to Alienation: “Marx’s words are like bats: one can see in them both birds and mice.”1 Approached from a commonsense point of view, Marx seems contradictory.
What does it mean for Marx’s ontology to be relational and processual? Let’s begin by looking at what it isn’t. In our daily lives, we often fall into reified thinking—reification is treating the social world as a collection of static, disconnected objects. Take the chair you’re sitting in, for example. We see it as a finished “thing,” but it wouldn’t exist without a massive chain of events: raw materials being pulled from the earth, labourers shaping those materials, and a global system transporting the finished product to you.
Common sense tells us to look at the chair as an isolated object, but doing that ignores the entire system of labour that created it. We tend to think the “market” just delivers things—as if one machine produced an object and you simply bought it for yourself. But if a simple chair is actually the result of human relationships and social history, then everything else in our capitalist system is, too. Once you see the world as a series of connected relations instead of a collection of “stuff,” you realize that the potential for change isn’t gone; we’ve just been trained to look at the world the wrong way.
Now, you might argue that you don’t need to know a chair’s history to know how to sit in it. That’s fair. But as we move from furniture to bigger ideas, you will see that our understanding of the world depends on how different parts of life are internally related. In this collection of social relations, no category stands alone. Their meanings are fluid and completely intertwined with one another.
In the spirit of this essay, we must keep in mind that Marx did not develop this approach in intellectual isolation. To provide context to Marx’s philosophy it is helpful to understand whose shoulders he was standing on (I’m not suggesting that who I explore below are the only thinkers who influenced Marx’s thinking).
Introductions to Marx tend to start with Hegel, but as John Bellamy Foster has demonstrated, it actually begins with Epicurus.
Epicurus and the Swerve
“It is characteristic of Epicurean philosophy that while commencing with ‘death the immortal’ as a materialist proposition imposing determinant limits, it swerves away from all teleology, mechanistic determinism, and fatalism.”—Foster
Born seven years after Plato’s death, Epicurus (341-270 BCE) studied while Platonism was still dominant. His own philosophy, in one way, can be seen as a reaction to Plato’s idealism, which at its core argued that reality exists outside of our grasp as forms or ideas. The chair you are sitting on is an imperfect reflection of a perfect chair that exists in the transcendent realm. To understand your chair, you would apply intellect and pure reason in the study of the “perfect” version. In contrast, Epicurus argued that your chair is a collection of atoms interacting in the void, and to know the chair, you must use your own physical senses.
Epicurus was also a practical philosopher concerned with human freedom during a period of severe political collapse. Following the death of Alexander the Great, the Greek city-states were shattered by warfare and widespread loss of freedom.2 His materialism was a direct response to this chaos—a way to hold on to human agency when the world felt out of control. As Foster points out in Breaking the Bonds of Fate, Epicurus created a new kind of practical action designed for human survival, sustainability, and happiness in a dying empire.3
Marx studied Epicurus deeply, writing his doctoral thesis on the difference between Epicurus and another philosopher, Democritus. Marx highlighted a key distinction: how each philosopher explained the movement of atoms. Democritus believed that atoms move mechanically through the void in different directions but always in straight lines, where every movement determines the next by necessity. Epicurus countered the rigidity of Democritus by introducing the swerve.4 The swerve occurs when an atom shifts slightly from its downward path, deviating by the smallest possible distance at different times and places.
Epicurus also challenged divine teleology—the idea that everything is designed with purpose and a specific goal—and mechanistic determinism—the idea that human action is determined by primary causes and physical laws. For Epicurus, the elimination of the potential for human agency, whether because of science or religion, was the enemy of human freedom.
For Marx, this small swerve sets the foundation. First, it creates the potential for agency. The universe is not pre-written; instead, it offers a space for “self-determination” within the practical realities of our society.5 Second, the swerve generates relations. If atoms only fall in straight lines, they will never interact; each atom simply falls in isolation through the void—remaining external to all other atoms. By swerving, their paths converge.
A key aspect here is that atoms are “subject to repulsion and attractions.”6 For Marx, this indicates a “dialectical unity” that suggests swerves are not random—they are realized through internal repulsion to other atoms, which generates the world we live in.7 It revealed to Marx that we are not merely “things” obeying economic laws like atoms on a fixed path. We exist in a series of social relations held together by these pushes and pulls, always containing the potential for agency.
Spinoza, The Substance, and How it Connects Us
“The essence of human beings is…an ensemble of that which passes between them; this ensemble includes both the matter of exchange and its form…[it] is nowhere else than between them.”—Fischbach
Reacting to the dualism of Descartes (I think, therefore I am), which divided the world between thought and matter, Spinoza (1632-1677) argued that viewing the world in isolation limits our ability to truly understand it.8 Through his philosophy of monism—the belief that everything is connected—Spinoza argued that mind and body are simply two different ways of perceiving the world—or, in his terms, two “attributes” of a single Substance.9
If Epicurus showed us the mechanics of the web—atoms swerving and colliding to create the world—then Spinoza showed us its depth. He argued that the web is infinite, connecting everything within it as the only true reality. This connection is not New Age spirituality, or abstract theory; it is rooted in humanity’s physical relationship to the natural world. For Spinoza, the world is not individual things existing together independently. He argued that only one Substance exists (God or Nature); the individual things we experience are simply finite “modes” or temporary ripples in that one Substance.10 We are not trapped in the Substance; rather, our activity is the Substance while also being limited by it.
For Spinoza, like Marx, this means that humanity is a part of nature—not separate or superior to it. Because we are finite, we cannot exist on our own; our lives are defined by our relationships to the rest of the natural world. We are dependent beings, shaped by forces beyond our control. Our existence comes from what Marx calls the “ensemble of social relations.” Furthermore, if the mind and body are one, then simply thinking about freedom isn’t enough to break us out of the substance.
We can clearly see the influence of Spinoza when Marx argues that consciousness and labour are part of the same process—two expressions of one underlying reality. As Marx writes in the 1844 Manuscripts, “That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.” This directly echoes Spinoza’s monism, grounded in materialist terms.
For Marx, this relationship is not an abstract connection; it is a “social metabolism”: a rational process of exchange between human labour and the earth. In a healthy state, this is a balanced give and take; under capitalism, this metabolism has been disrupted, resulting in what Foster calls the metabolic rift.
Marx transforms Spinoza’s static Substance into a living metabolism by identifying ‘Substance’ as human labour. But for this metabolism to move and have history, it requires a specific engine: the force of contradiction. This is where Marx turns to Hegel. If Spinoza mapped the internal relations of the substance, Hegel described the internal tensions that keep it in constant motion.
Hegel and Process
“Contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it is only in so far as something has a contradiction within it that it moves, has an urge and activity.”—Hegel
Hegel argued that things aren’t defined by some fixed, inner “essence,” but by their opposites. In this view, reality is a relationship in motion. If you remove one side of a relationship the other side ceases to exist in its current form. Hegel called this constant clashing of internal opposites the Dialectic—it’s the study of how the tensions built into a system eventually force it toward sudden, transformative leaps.
While Hegel was not the first to highlight the importance of contradiction and movement (consider Heraclitus’s observation that you never step into the same river twice: noting that it wasn’t just the river that transforms, but the person stepping into it as well), as György Lukács argues,
he was the first since Heraclitus for whom contradiction formed the ultimate ontological principle, and not just something that had somehow or other to be overcome.11
First, the idea of contradiction as an ontological principle suggests that contradiction is more than just a feature, or something to be corrected. Rather, it is the “dynamic basis of reality as a whole”;12 substance, for example, is a vibrating structure held together by tension—and things only exist because of the friction between internally connected opposites.
However, Lukács explains that Hegel’s dialectic eventually hits a dead end. While Hegel’s method was based on constant movement, his system demanded a final destination. Hegel believed his own era was the final realization of the “Idea,” which essentially froze the very process he discovered. If the present is the peak of reason, then history stops unfolding. This creates a system where the dialectic becomes a closed loop.13 Marx realized that for the dialectic to remain a revolutionary weapon, he had to break it out of that loop. History isn’t a finished story; it’s an ongoing, material process that no single “idea” can complete.
Marx didn’t want to “fix” the contradiction though; he wanted to map how it moves. He moved past the idea that a system must be “harmonious” to function. Using the analogy of an ellipse, he showed how a body can stay in motion by both falling toward and flying away from a center point. The ellipse doesn’t resolve the tension—it organizes it. This means the clash between capital and labour isn’t a bug in the system; it’s the system’s very way of moving. Our social web stays intact precisely because of this “falling and flying,” a metabolic process that requires tension to exist at all.14
The Anatomy of the Organic Whole
“The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”—Marx
By combining Spinoza’s scale and Hegel’s movement, Marx arrived at the concept of the Organic Whole.15 We are now moving from the parts to the totalized view the parts helped Marx build. Think of it like a human body: you cannot understand the heart if you ignore the lungs or the brain; our pumping blood is the process that connects all the internally related parts of our body. They all produce each other. As we abstract the particulars of our world (our individual organs), we are also constructing an understanding of the totality (our body).16
To understand this Organic Whole, we should recognize Lukács’s distinction between ontological priority and causal supremacy. Critics often dismiss Marx as a rigid economic determinist, but Lukács clarifies that the “base” is foundational only in an ontological sense: social being can exist without ideology, but ideology cannot exist without social being. This is a claim about dependence, not a claim that the economy is the sole cause of every historical event.17
In our web of social relations, labour provides the “material floor”—the ontological foundation—but every other aspect like law, culture, and politics is internally related to that foundation. These forces shape the economic world as much as they are shaped by it.18 For Marx, it is a relationship of mutual “correspondence” within a living totality. When we view the world as an organic whole, we stop seeing “high prices” or “low wages” as accidents or “facts of life.” We see them as the necessary results of how the body of capitalism is currently breathing. To change the symptoms, you must change the internal relations of the whole organism.
If this web is so fundamental, why does mainstream economics act like we live in a void? Marx points to the way classical theorists started their books with a single, isolated individual making “rational” choices in a vacuum, as if the rest of the social world didn’t exist.
The Robinsonades
“Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions… Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any.”—Marx
Marx himself mockingly referred to the starting point of classical economics as “Robinsonades”—fantasies that place an isolated hunter or fisherman outside of society to explain the origin of economic laws. In the Grundrisse (Marx’s private notes leading to the writing of Capital), Marx argues that the “individual and isolated hunter” of the classical economists is not history’s starting point, but its result.19
By removing the historical relations that make “Capital,” economists present it as a “general, eternal relation of nature.” This strips the historical character from a category until the “thing” appears as a timeless, natural fact rather than a temporary arrangement of our social metabolism. With this, we can understand why Marx reacted to the classical economists the way he did. The issue goes beyond getting the facts wrong; their method was ontologically flawed.
You cannot isolate the ‘economy’ from its history, politics, and culture and expect to demonstrate an understanding of its place in the metabolic web. By doing so, bourgeois economics doesn’t just misread capitalism, it actively makes capitalism look like a Natural Law rather than a historical process. The facts are fetishized and presented back to us as the only possible reality.
Think of a landlord and a tenant. You cannot be a landlord without someone else’s rent cheque, and you aren’t a tenant unless someone else owns the property. The social arrangement plays a role in defining both the landlord and the tenant. If we change the way we manage housing, those categories also change. The landlord only exists because of their internal relation to the tenant within this temporary version of the web. And even the existence is processual. The Landlord is an example of a process of accumulation. The tenant is participating in the life-process of the system that keeps things moving.
The Philosophy of Internal Relations
“Tomorrow is today extended.”—Ollman
To understand this, we can adopt what Ollman calls the Philosophy of Internal Relations. In this view, categories like ‘Capital’ or ‘Labour’ are not things, but expressions of relations. As Ollman argues, Capital is not a pile of money or a factory; it is a social relation that internally contains the worker and the capitalist. If you remove the wage-labourer, Capital ceases to exist—not because an external connection was broken, but because a part of what Capital is has been removed.20
We are moving away from the idea of “interaction” between isolated parts and toward a sense of “inner-action.” Think of it as the difference between two billiard balls hitting each other and the way a heart and lungs work together.21
Marx provides an illustration of this ‘inner-action’ in the Grundrisse when he examines the relationship between production and consumption. To common sense, these are separate acts: one person makes an object, and another uses it up. But Marx demonstrates that they are internally related moments of a single process. Not only is production ‘immediately’ consumption (as it consumes raw materials and labour), but production actually produces the consumer. As Marx writes, an object of art ‘creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.’ Production doesn’t just satisfy an existing need; it creates the ‘internally impelling cause’—the hunger—for the object itself.22
We must reject the fiction of the self-made, isolated individual. In this ontological view, human existence is defined by a state of dependency; we are finite beings whose very survival requires a constant metabolic exchange with the world around us. Our physical and social needs are not just cravings, but rather the material proof that we are connected to a vast, invisible series of relations. Even our capacity for agency is not a power we possess in isolation, but a potentiality that is realized only through our interaction with the natural world. When we view the world this way, the illusion of “things” begins to melt away. A chair is no longer seen as a static, independent object; instead, it is revealed to be a specific snapshot of human labour and social history, momentarily frozen into a form we can touch and trade.
The Impact of Historical Amnesia
“Capitalist power over both subjective and objective conditions fosters a continuous destruction of reason, thus yielding historical amnesia… enabling a total cultural reshape [where] everything must change to prevent anything from changing.”—Hermeto
In Phenomenology of the Capitalist Eternisation23, João Romeiro Hermeto shows how our social metabolism is transformed into a concrete wall. He calls this “Capitalist Eternisation.” It occurs when we abandon a “process ontology” and begin to treat capitalist categories as if they were eternal laws of nature. By submitting to this “atomization,” we treat the present as inevitable and “mystify social relations.” At the level of a simple commodity, this means failing to see the human labour that produced your chair. At a higher level, it means failing to see how categories like “Rent” are internally related to the whole. Ultimately, it is a process of forgetting that history is driven by the actions of interconnected individuals and their labour.
As Hermeto shows, this “eternisation” has two devastating consequences for the working class:
First: Historical Amnesia. We lose the ability to see the path that brought us here. We start to believe that “the market” or “private property” have always existed, viewing greed as “human nature” rather than the result of specific material conditions. Hermeto argues this creates a “blindness” to the fact that these are specific social relations produced at a specific time. This amnesia strips away our agency; we forget that because these relations were created by people, they can be changed by people.
Second: The Perpetual Present. If a system is viewed as “eternal,” the present moment becomes a cage. Hermeto describes the Perpetual Present as a state where the “now” gains social priority, and the future is no longer an “open horizon of possibilities” but a “menace”. In this state, we stop writing history; social and natural history become one and the same, and the results of our actions feel like random “destiny” rather than the result of collective will. By hiding the “swerve” and the potential for change, the ruling class uses the Perpetual Present to limit our ability to even imagine a different world.
Breaking Capital’s Logic
Ultimately, the chair you are sitting on is not a static object; it is a snapshot of a social metabolism: a moment of human labour and natural resources momentarily frozen in time. When we adopt Marx’s ontology, that “thing-ness” begins to melt away, revealing the internal relations and the friction of contradictions that actually drive our history.
This isn’t just an academic exercise. This perspective is a weapon. It strips the “natural” mask off of capitalism, showing us that the system isn’t an eternal law of gravity we must obey, but a specific arrangement of our own making. The swerve is the physical proof that the straight line of capital’s logic can be broken.
Notes:
- Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1976), p. 3
- John Bellamy Foster, Breaking the Bonds of Fate (Monthly Review Press, New York, 2025), p. 17
- Foster, p 13.
- Foster, p. 144-145
- Foster, p. 145
- Foster, p. 81
- Foster, p. 83
- Franck Fischbach, Marx with Spinoza: Production, Alienation, History (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2023) p. vii-viii, 46.
- Fischbach, p. viii, 23-24
- Fischbach, p. 16-17, 23-24, 116.
- György Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, Volume 1: Hegel (Merlin Press, London), p. 2.
- Lukács, Vol 1. Hegel, p. 3.
- Lukács, Vol 1. Hegel, p. 11, 19.
- Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), p. 198.
- Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (University of Illinois Press, Urbana/Chicago), p. 36-40, 136.
- Ollman, Dance, p. 36-38, 140.
- György Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, Volume 2: Marx (Merlin Press, London), p. 150
- Lukács, Vol 2. Marx, p. 59
- Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), translated by Martin Nicolaus (Penguin Books, London), p. 83-84.
- Ollman, Dance, p. 116.
- Ollman, Dance, p. 140
- Marx, Grundrisse, p. 83-84, 92.
- João Romeiro Hermeto, Phenomenology of the Capitalist Eternisation (Iskra Books, U.S. | England | Ireland, 2025)