"My view of *Capital* is...founded on the supposition that Marx...was primarily interested in the language employed oridinarily within capitalist and commodity producing societies. In my view *Capital* is an analytical work proceeding from that ordinary language, though a critique of the 'science' of political economy which purported to explain it, ascending ultimately to a realm in which conceptual relations, deemed 'logical' or 'conceptual', can be traced out. That realm relates to meaning, rather to 'matter' or anything 'material', in so far as the 'material' is concevied as something apart from and indifferent to language. This leads me to see Marx's analysis as profoundly alterior to common sense, something which he regarded as in any case pretty commonly misleading. More startingly, it also leads to a Marx who is highly 'idealist' in the philosophical sense, that is, holding to a view that concepts help construct or determine reality, and even give rise to it. "This need not however generate a Hegelian Marx, in the sense that concepts need not literally (or even figuratively) generate and control the reality that the 'philosopher' comes to know. Rather in introducing this rereading of Capital, I refer to Marx's condemnation of traditional materialism and to his fulsome praise for philosophical idealism in his *Theses on Feuerbach*...My view is that [Marx took] as his datum the language of real life, portraying capitalism as something like a Foucauldian 'regime of truth,' and attempting to generate a type of poltics that is both constrained and empowered by the conceptual relations of capitalism". p. 27
rb