Real abstraction

The term “real abstraction” was first popularized by Alfred Sohn-Rethel as a means to extend Marx’s critique of political economy to the critique of society and of epistemology. Subsequent authors - beginning with, but not limited to, those associated with the so-called Neue-Marx-Lektüre (New Marx Reading) - have deployed this category, explicitly or otherwise, to backread Marx’s own analysis of production. While Sohn-Rethel’s focus is primarily abstraction in the form of thought and its origin in pre-capitalist commodity exchange, others have pursued a more strictly Marxian approach and identified real abstraction as belonging in the specific process of capitalist production. In this way, the critique of real abstraction in the thought becomes associated with the critique of capitalist production, and the critique of society is reconnected again with the critique of political economy.