Capitalism is the first thing-in-itself grounding all later metaphysical dilemmas.

Evidence

Yet this static relationship to the objects of knowledge is itself but a reflection of the life experience of the middle classes in the economic and social realm. Their relationship to the objects that they produce, to the commodities, the factories, the very structure of capitalism itself is a contemplative one, in that they are not aware of capitalism as a historical phenomenon, as being itself the result of historical forces, as having within itself also the possibility of change or of radical transformation. They can understand everything about their social environment (its elements, its functioning, its implicit laws) except the sheer historical existence of that environment itself: their rationalism can assimilate everything but the ultimate questions of purpose and origin. In this sense, capitalism is itself the first thing-in-itself, and the primal contradiction upon which all later, more specialized and abstract dilemmas are founded. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 378

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The dialectical inversion—capitalism as the ur-noumenon, with Kant’s thing-in-itself as derivative—is the single most powerful move in this section and a paradigm-shifting way to read the history of philosophy.
• XREF: Directly the Lukácsian seed that Jameson cultivates into postmodernism’s flattening of historicity; also echoes Marx’s ‘capital as an automatic subject’ and anticipates Žižek’s capitalism-as-real.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘Capital as noumenon’—reading the contemporary inability to imagine alternatives to capitalism as the latest form of the thing-in-itself dilemma, updated via Jameson to the postmodern.