Being, becoming, subsumption

De Sicilia examines the Kantian roots of a Marxist problematic. One of the fundamental tensions within Marx's writings arises from the complex relationship between the systematic and historical aspects of his description of capitalist society. A century and a half after the publication of Capital--and in light of the historical adventures of communism that must, for the most part, be considered as an accumulation of catastrophic failures--this tension continues to both energize and attenuate the reception of Marx's thought, symptomatically expressing the radically distinctive and still elusory practical-theoretical foundations of his project. On the one hand, capital is depicted by Marx as an ensemble of social relations forming an apparently closed totality capable of reproducing itself purely through its own internal dynamism: capital as self-sufficient system.