Marx is a prisoner of the Enemy he is attacking: his opponent’s body falls on him and suffocates him. Marx has the definitive view of that machine-for-demolishing-limits that he calls capitalism, yet he doesn’t question the limit, only the machine. He wants to design a better machine, which demolishes limits without breaking down, without getting into periodical crisis. Like a great mechanic, he has a fond, passionate understanding of the capitalist machine. With regard to limit, he shares the illusion of that machine. What offended him was not so much the iniquity brought about by capital, but the fact that capital would soon become an obstacle to production, an antiquated and sclerotic form in comparison to the enormity of what is possible. No one has ever dreamed the dream of capital with such faith as Marx developed in his soul. Like the young provincial boy who takes seriously, with despairing gravity, the ways of the big city: that is how Marx looked upon capital. And, feeling much like Rastignac on the hill of Père Lachaise, he let loose on the world something whose output should have been far more limitless than that of that old machine for destroying limits. Capital had become his Madame de Beauséant. She had taught him good manners, she had introduced him to society, but now he saw her as a wizened old woman, faintly ridiculous, her days now over. So instead he turned his gaze to the debutantes of the proletariat.

So far as development is concerned, it can be said in the end that Marx was more capitalist than capital. Shrewd and meticulous, he searched everywhere to trace the limits of that power that breaks down limits. He wanted to reach the point from which he could look at capitalist production as a form that was borné, timid, trapped in itself, and despise it just as capital had despised earlier forms: “(… the most extreme form of alienation … contains in itself, in a still only inverted form, turned on its head, the dissolution of all limited presuppositions of production, and moreover creates and produces the unconditional presuppositions of production, and therewith the full material conditions for the total, universal development of the productive forces of the individual).” This is a voice of vibrant demonism, the urge for unlimited self-creation: having reached perfect dissolution, the absolute expropriation of man, he imagines he can fill the void at last with all that man had never been. Marx’s fury ends up, not in a humanitarian idyll, but in a savage technological hallucination.

Marx jubilant: “[Capital] therefore restricts labor and the creation of value—by an artificial check, as the English express it—and it does so on the same grounds as and to the same extent that it posits surplus labor and surplus value.⁴⁸⁴ By its nature, therefore, it posits a barrier to labor and value-creation, in contradiction to its tendency to expand them boundlessly. And in as much as it both posits a barrier specific to itself, and on the other side equally drives over and beyond every barrier, it is the living contradiction.” The enemy is nailed to its limit. But Marx has no wish to consider that the limit exists in nature or in the mind.