There is a tension in this philosophical reading of Marx. It wants to hang on to some way of using the category of eternal capital. It does not quite want to admit that if capital is indeed continually mutating and self-modifying, then it has no essence, and “appearances” need to be taken seriously as not mere phenomenal forms but as actual forms in the world. In short: there can be no “Marxism” as a philosophy produced by means of philosophy, which takes the essence of capital as its subject. The modifications in so-called phenomenal forms need to be understood as more than mere phenomena, and that requires a more modest approach to the forms of knowledge it might possess of those modifications.

In short, intellectual work after Marx could only be a collaborative practice of knowledge among different but equal ways of knowing, where philosophy is not the ruling party. Or to put it in a quite different language: the statement “the essence of technology is nothing technological” is fundamentally untrue and a barrier to thought.11 Technology really does need to be understood through the collaboration of specialized forms of knowledge about what it actually is and does. The attempt to make philosophy a ruling “technology of essence” is retrograde: the technology of essence is nothing essential.