Praxis Seminar Series 2025-26: Session 17

Tamara Caraus

Praxis-CFUL

How to Grasp a Totality? On Marx’s Method in Grundrisse

14 April 2026, 17:15

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

 

Abstract

This presentation advances the premise that understanding today’s interconnected, capital-shaped global reality requires returning to Marx’s concept of totality in the Grundrisse. It proceeds by outlining the key features of totality in the Grundrisse: an ‘organic whole’ constituted through contradictory moments, historically formed, open, and continuously transforming, with a more focused examination on how totality emerges alongside a new form of social connection that simultaneously produce alienation – ‘an alien power’ and thing-like social relations. The central question addressed is how the features of capital’s totality are depicted and what method enables their discovery and apprehension. Thus, the presentation argues that totality in the Grundrisse is both an explanatory meta-category and a target of critique. As a meta-category, it encompasses all other categories of political economy not as a sum but by viewing them as interlinked moments of a whole. Totality is simultaneously a target of critique, since it is not a harmonious entity but is constituted through discontinuities and alienation. The method of critique proceeds immanently, by tracking ‘inner connections’ from one disconnection to another, from one thing-like social relation to the next, to reveal underlying dependencies and co-constitutions. This de-alienating critique, tentatively elaborated in the Grundrisse, functions as a guiding methodological principle for Capital. A crucial yet often overlooked aspect of this critique is that it operates only on the presupposition of totality, and conversely, totality and the alienated social relations it generates can be grasped only through critique. The concluding remarks emphasize the continuity of Marx’s critical project and point out how the concept of totality in the Grundrisse provides a foundational principle for developing a Global Critical Theory capable of understanding contemporary interconnected and alienated social realities.

 

This activity is funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within the project UID/00310/2025, Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa (DOI: https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00310/2025).