The Illusion of the Economic

Capital reaches its consummation in ‘The Trinity Formula’, the chapter that opens the seventh, and concluding, part of Volume III.1 This unfinished chapter rounds out Marx’s six-fold project in Capital: 1. to present and examine in the form of a systematic dialectic the social forms constitutive of the capitalist order, beginning with the (generalized) commodity; 2. to expose capitalist society, in its enlightened secularism, to be idolatrous and fetishistic; 3. to reveal that the social egalitarianism of capitalist society harbours class domination; 4. to examine and critically evaluate representations and theories of capitalism; 5. to show how capitalist social forms naturally exude ideological representations; and 6. to reveal capitalism to be a historically specific mode of production whose contradictory dynamics point towards its eventually giving way to a historically new mode of production. As such, the chapter sheds a great deal of light on Marx’s purposes and accomplishments in Capital and on the structure of his exposition. The title ‘The Trinity Formula’ drives home Marx’s master theme that capitalism is the secular epitome of Christianity’s ‘cult of man in the abstract’ (Marx, 1967: 172).2