The Forgotten Category: Marxist Critique and the Question of Language
My first encounter with Marxism was not through the unfinished movement of a thinker searching for concepts, but through an already organized intellectual structure. Like many students introduced to Marxist theory through university courses, I encountered a system divided into three interconnected fields: dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and political economy. The first presented the general laws of development governing nature, society, and thought; the second applied those principles to the historical organization of human societies; the third examined the internal logic of capitalism through concepts such as commodity, value, labour, capital, and surplus value.
This organization had a clear pedagogical function. It offered students a map. Complex ideas could be located within a coherent architecture, and a vast body of writing could be approached through a limited number of fundamental principles. Such organization is not in itself problematic. Every intellectual tradition requires forms of transmission, selection, and clarification. Without some degree of simplification, no philosophy could become teachable.
Yet this very process introduces a philosophical question. What happens when concepts created to challenge established forms of thought become themselves established forms of thought? What happens when categories originally developed as historical interventions begin to appear as stable foundations? The issue is not that concepts are simplified. Simplification is an unavoidable condition of teaching. The issue is that simplification can conceal the historical and intellectual struggles from which concepts emerged.
The student often encounters Marxism not first as an ongoing investigation but as a conceptual architecture already completed. The categories appear before the questions that generated them. The laws appear before the contradictions they were designed to interpret. The system appears before the movement of thought that produced the system.
This transformation is not unique to Marxism. It is a recurring tension in the history of philosophy. A concept begins as a response to a challenge, as an attempt to make visible something that had remained hidden. Over time, however, the concept can become detached from the historical situation that gave rise to it. What was once a critical tool can become an inherited framework; what was once an intervention can become an established vocabulary.
The paradox is particularly significant in the case of Marxism because historical transformation is not merely one of its themes; it is one of its fundamental principles. Marxism sought to reveal that social relations often presented as natural were in fact historically produced. Categories such as labour, exchange, and value were not eternal realities but forms that emerged under specific social conditions. The critical force of these concepts depended precisely on their ability to reveal contingency beneath apparent necessity.
The question that emerges, therefore, is not whether Marxist categories are true or false, but what happens when categories designed to historicize reality become separated from their own historical emergence.
What had to be forgotten for Marxism to become teachable?
The question does not imply that something was deliberately removed or that the teaching of Marxism necessarily distorted Marx's thought. Rather, it points toward a structural problem of transmission itself. Every theory that becomes teachable must undergo a process of organization. But every organization risks leaving something behind: unresolved tensions, conceptual uncertainties, competing possibilities, and the historical circumstances that made the concepts necessary in the first place.
The challenge, then, is not to recover some pure Marxism hidden behind all later interpretations. The challenge is to examine the distance between a living theoretical process and the stable form it acquires when transformed into a system of instruction.
From Question to Category: The Pedagogical Transformation of Philosophy
The transformation of theory into pedagogy can be understood through a simple but fundamental distinction: the difference between a concept as a question and a concept as an answer.
A philosophical concept rarely begins as a finished instrument. It emerges because something demands explanation. It is born from a difficulty, a contradiction, or an unresolved tension. Only later does it become a category that can be transmitted, classified, and applied.
Marx's analysis of labour provides a revealing example. A simplified formulation often associated with Marxist economics is that labour creates value. Yet Marx's investigation does not begin from this statement as an unquestioned principle. His question is more complex: why does labour appear as the source of value within capitalist society? The problem is not simply to identify labour as a productive activity but to understand the historical conditions under which human activity takes the social form of value-producing labour.
The difference between these two formulations is decisive. The first offers a conclusion. The second opens an investigation. The first can become a doctrine to be repeated; the second remains a historical paradox to be examined.
When a concept forgets the tension from which it emerged, it begins to appear self-evident. The question disappears, leaving only the answer. The historical struggle disappears, leaving only the category.
The danger is not that the concept becomes false. It is that the concept becomes unaware of its own conditions of existence.
A critical theory depends upon the ability of its concepts to reveal what has been hidden. Yet the same concepts can eventually become familiar enough to hide their own historical formation. The moment when a question becomes a category is therefore also the moment when a concept risks forgetting that it was once a question.
Nietzsche: The Forgetting of Metaphor
The problem of forgetting the origins of concepts finds one of its most radical formulations in Nietzsche's reflections on truth. Nietzsche does not argue that what we call truth is simply false, nor does he suggest that knowledge is nothing more than arbitrary invention. His argument is more subtle: truths become authoritative when they conceal the processes through which they were produced.
In "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense," Nietzsche famously describes truths as metaphors that have forgotten that they are metaphors. The force of this statement does not lie in reducing truth to fiction. The important point is the moment of forgetting. A metaphor becomes a truth when the traces of its creation disappear, when a human construction begins to appear as something independent of human activity.
The metaphor does not become powerful because it ceases to exist as a metaphor. It becomes powerful because its metaphorical origin is no longer visible.
This insight provides a useful framework for understanding the fate of theoretical concepts. Concepts, like truths, can acquire authority precisely by concealing the historical circumstances that produced them. A category can become so familiar that it appears not as a specific intellectual construction responding to a particular problem, but as a neutral description of reality itself.
Applied to Marxism, this does not mean that Marxist categories are merely metaphors or arbitrary inventions. Such a conclusion would misunderstand both Nietzsche and Marx. The point is not to deny the explanatory power of concepts such as labour, value, production, or class. The point is to ask what happens when concepts developed to reveal historical processes begin to appear detached from their own historical conditions.
A category loses part of its critical force when it forgets that it was produced. The concept of labour, for example, becomes theoretically powerful in Marx because it allows an analysis of a historically specific social relation. It reveals that what appears to be a natural economic activity is structured by particular social conditions. Yet if labour becomes simply an eternal category applicable without qualification to all human societies, something changes. The concept no longer reveals historicity; it risks concealing it.
The problem, therefore, is not that a theory produces concepts; every theory must do so. The dilemma begins when concepts become separated from the questions, conflicts, and historical circumstances that made them necessary.
Nietzsche's contribution to this discussion is not a rejection of knowledge but a demand for genealogy. He asks us to look behind what appears self-evident and recover the forgotten processes of formation. What seems natural often has a history; what seems necessary often has conditions of emergence.
This is precisely the movement required when examining any critical tradition. The question is not only what concepts explain, but also what they conceal about their own production.
A critical theory becomes vulnerable not when it creates categories, but when those categories forget that they are historical achievements rather than timeless discoveries. The danger is not that concepts become false; it is that they become incapable of remembering the conditions that gave them their critical power.
Barthes: Myth as Forgotten History
Roland Barthes provides another vocabulary for understanding this process of forgetting. In Mythologies, his concern is not primarily with false ideas but with ideas that have lost the appearance of being constructed. Myth, for Barthes, is not simply an error or a lie. It is a historical meaning that presents itself as natural.
His famous formulation is that myth transforms history into nature.
This transformation describes a particular operation. Something produced within a specific historical and cultural context gradually loses the signs of its own production. It ceases to appear as one possible arrangement among others and begins to appear as the inevitable order of things.
This distinction is essential when applying Barthes's analysis to Marxist concepts. The argument is not that concepts such as labour, production, class, revolution, or history are myths in the sense of being false. These concepts emerged from serious attempts to analyse historical realities. Their critical importance lies precisely in their capacity to challenge supposedly natural social arrangements.
The danger arises when a historically produced category becomes detached from the history of its own production. At that moment, a concept that originally revealed contingency can begin to function as if it expressed necessity.
Consider the concept of labour. Within Marx's critique of political economy, labour is not simply an eternal human activity. It is analysed as a historically specific social form connected to capitalism. The category gains its critical force because it reveals that economic relations often presented as natural are actually historically organized.
However, when the historical conditions that shaped the category disappear from view, labour can begin to appear as a universal foundation underlying all societies in the same way. The concept risks moving from historical analysis toward ontological assumption.
The same question can be asked of production, class, revolution, and history itself. These concepts are not problematic because they exist; they are indispensable instruments of analysis. The question is what happens when their historical emergence becomes invisible.
This is where Barthes's notion of myth becomes particularly useful. Myth does not destroy history; it conceals history. It does not eliminate the process through which something came into being; it removes the traces of that process from view.
A similar danger exists for critical theories. A concept created to expose hidden structures can itself become naturalized when its own conditions of emergence are forgotten. The critical category begins to resemble the very forms of naturalization that it was originally designed to challenge.
The paradox is therefore not unique to Marxism. It concerns the fate of all successful concepts. A concept becomes powerful because it clarifies reality, but its very success can make the history of its own formation disappear.
The task of critique is consequently not only to produce new concepts but also to remember the contingency of existing ones. It must preserve the historical movement that produced its categories rather than allowing them to harden into unquestioned foundations.
In this sense, Barthes's insight extends beyond the analysis of cultural myths. It reveals a general problem of intellectual life: the tendency of human beings to forget the history of the concepts through which they understand history itself.
The Forgotten Category: Language
The previous sections have examined how concepts can lose their historical conditions of emergence and acquire an appearance of necessity. Nietzsche described this process as the forgetting of metaphor; Barthes described it as the transformation of history into nature. Both perspectives point toward a deeper question: how do concepts become capable of appearing as transparent descriptions of reality?
This question introduces a dimension often absent from traditional accounts of theoretical categories: language itself.
Within many philosophical traditions, concepts are primarily examined according to their relation to reality. The central question is often whether a concept accurately represents, explains, or corresponds to the object it describes. Yet the linguistic turn introduced a different problem. Before asking whether a category represents reality correctly, one must ask how that category becomes possible in the first place. How do certain words acquire the power to organize experience? How do particular terms become available as ways of seeing and interpreting the world?
This question is especially relevant for Marxist categories. Concepts such as labour, value, class, production, and revolution are usually studied as analytical instruments. The focus is placed on what these concepts reveal about society. Less attention is often given to their linguistic dimension: the fact that they are not simply neutral containers of meaning but historical signs that participate in systems of difference and interpretation.
The question is therefore not only:
What does labour mean?
It is also:
How did the term labour become capable of organizing social reality in this particular way?
Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics provides a crucial shift in perspective. Saussure argued that the meaning of a sign does not arise from an intrinsic connection between a word and an independently existing essence. Meaning emerges through difference. A sign means what it means because it occupies a particular position within a system of relations.
This insight does not imply that language is detached from reality or that meanings are arbitrary in a simple sense. Rather, it reveals that meaning is never produced by direct access to things themselves. Human beings encounter reality through systems of distinction that make certain experiences intelligible.
Applied to theoretical categories, this means that concepts do not simply name pre-existing objects. They participate in producing the frameworks through which objects become recognizable as objects of knowledge.
The category of labour provides an illuminating example. Labour is not merely a word attached to a natural human activity that exists independently of historical interpretation. Different societies have organized human activity through different distinctions: work and leisure, production and reproduction, productive and unproductive activity, necessary and unnecessary labour. The meaning of labour emerges within specific social and linguistic structures.
Marx's achievement was precisely to reveal that what appears natural is historically organized. Yet the linguistic perspective adds another layer: the categories through which history is analysed are themselves mediated by language. They do not stand outside the historical processes they describe.
This is where Derrida's contribution becomes significant. Derrida radicalizes the Saussurean insight by emphasizing that concepts never fully coincide with themselves. Every sign contains traces of other meanings, other contexts, and other possibilities that exceed its apparent stability. A concept is not a self-contained unit of meaning; it carries within itself the history of its differences and exclusions.
From this perspective, a category is not a transparent window through which reality can simply be observed. It is an artifact: a historical and linguistic construction whose meaning depends upon relations that precede and exceed it.
This does not mean that concepts are useless or that theoretical analysis is impossible. On the contrary, concepts are indispensable. The point is that their power does not come from escaping history and language, but from operating within them.
Here a connection with Kant becomes possible. Kant's critical philosophy asked about the conditions of possibility of knowledge. His analysis did not begin with objects alone but with the structures that make experience intelligible. The linguistic turn extends this question further. It asks not only about the categories through which the mind organizes experience but about the linguistic systems through which categories themselves become available.
The forgotten category, therefore, is not simply another concept missing from a list of Marxist categories. It is the medium through which all categories appear.
Language does not replace history, society, or material conditions. Rather, it reminds us that access to those conditions is always mediated. Even the most materialist analysis requires terms, distinctions, and conceptual frameworks that are themselves historically produced.
The implication for Marxism is not that its categories should be abandoned, but that they must remain open to the same historical questioning they apply to social reality. If historical materialism teaches that human societies must be understood through their conditions of emergence, then the language of historical materialism must also become an object of historical reflection.
A critical theory must therefore turn its attention not only toward what its concepts reveal, but also toward the linguistic conditions that allow those concepts to reveal anything at all.
The category forgotten by critique may not be another category among others. It may be the very medium in which categories become possible.
Baudrillard: When Critique Becomes Universal
The question of forgotten origins reaches its most radical formulation in Jean Baudrillard's critique of Marxism. Unlike a conventional rejection of Marxist theory, Baudrillard's argument does not begin by denying the importance of Marx's historical analysis. On the contrary, he recognizes that Marxism's critical force emerged precisely from its ability to challenge supposedly universal categories.
Marxism exposed the historical character of concepts that bourgeois thought often presented as natural and timeless. Labour, exchange, value, and economic relations were not eternal features of human existence but forms that emerged under specific historical conditions. The power of Marxist analysis came from revealing history beneath what appeared to be nature.
Baudrillard's question, however, concerns what happens when this critical operation is not applied to Marxism itself.
His argument in The Mirror of Production is not simply that Marxism failed to historicize society. It is that Marxism did not completely historicize its own categories. The concepts that allowed Marxism to uncover the historical character of other forms of thought gradually risked becoming exempt from the very critique they had developed.
The problem is therefore one of reflexivity.
If history reveals that social forms are produced under particular conditions, then the concept of history itself must also be understood historically. If production is a historically specific organization of social relations, then production cannot automatically function as a universal explanatory principle applicable to every society. If dialectical thinking reveals contradictions within systems, then dialectics must also turn back upon itself and examine its own conditions of possibility.
In Baudrillard's formulation, historical materialism must itself become historical.
This demand does not destroy Marxist concepts. It radicalizes their own critical impulse. A truly historical theory cannot place itself outside history. A theory that explains the formation of concepts must also examine the formation of its own concepts.
Here Baudrillard's argument converges with the broader movement explored throughout this essay. Nietzsche showed that truths become powerful when they forget their metaphorical origins. Barthes showed that myths transform historical constructions into natural appearances. Saussure and Derrida revealed that meaning emerges through systems of difference rather than transparent access to reality. Baudrillard applies a similar logic to critique itself.
The danger is not that critique produces concepts. Without concepts, critique would be impossible. The danger appears when concepts forget that they were produced. At that moment, the critical instrument begins to resemble the structures it originally sought to question.
This is why Baudrillard's critique is particularly relevant to the problem of pedagogy. Once a theory becomes a system of established categories, its concepts can begin to function independently of the historical struggles that produced them. What began as an attempt to expose hidden structures can become a structure of explanation that itself appears unquestionable.
The irony is profound: a theory created to reveal the historicity of social relations may itself become resistant to historical analysis.
Baudrillard's intervention therefore does not simply add another criticism of Marxism. It exposes a recurring mistake in theoretical traditions: the tendency of successful concepts to universalize themselves. A concept gains power because it illuminates reality, but its very success can make the conditions of its own emergence disappear.
The challenge for any critical theory is therefore self-reflexivity. It must preserve the ability to question not only the world it analyses but also the categories through which that analysis becomes possible.
Critique must remain capable of becoming the object of critique.
The Waste of Theory
Every theory creates a system of intelligibility. It selects concepts, establishes relations, identifies structures, and provides a framework through which reality becomes understandable. Without such processes of organization, thought would remain without direction. Yet every act of organization also produces a remainder.
What remains outside when a theory becomes a system?
The answer is not simply error. The excluded remainder is not necessarily composed of false ideas that the theory has successfully eliminated. More often, it consists of what cannot be fully absorbed into the system: unresolved tensions, contradictory elements, forgotten origins, alternative possibilities, and linguistic residues that resist complete stabilization.
This remainder is what may be called the waste of theory.
The word "waste" does not indicate something worthless. It refers to what remains after a process of selection and purification. Just as every social order produces forms of exclusion, every conceptual order produces elements that do not fully conform to its categories.
The transformation of philosophy into pedagogy intensifies this process. In order to become teachable, a theory must organize itself. Questions become categories. Categories become principles. Principles become a system. The system becomes easier to transmit, but something is left behind: the movement of thought that generated it.
The waste is therefore not outside theory because it failed. It is outside because it resisted complete purification.
This perspective changes how we understand philosophical traditions. The goal is not to recover some original, pure version of a theory before it became institutionalized. No such purity exists. Every theory is already a history of interpretations, transformations, and transmissions.
The task is rather to remember what successful concepts tend to make invisible: the forgotten question behind the answer, the historical process behind the category, the metaphor behind the truth, the linguistic differences that make meaning possible, and the contingency behind what appears as necessity.
A critical theory remains alive not because it possesses final concepts, but because it remains capable of questioning its own concepts. Its strength lies not only in what it explains but in what it allows to remain unresolved.
The danger of theory is not that it produces abstractions. Abstraction is unavoidable. The danger is that abstractions forget the concrete histories that produced them.
Perhaps the deepest lesson of the critique of Marxism is therefore not a lesson about Marxism alone. It concerns the destiny of all intellectual systems. Every theory that succeeds faces the temptation of forgetting the conditions of its own success.
Critique does not fail when it produces concepts; it fails when those concepts forget that they were produced.
The task of thought is not to eliminate this remainder. It is to preserve a relation with it. The waste of theory is precisely what reminds concepts that they never completely coincide with themselves.
References
Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1957)
Baudrillard, J. (1981). For a critique of the political economy of the sign (C. Levin, Trans.). Telos Press. (Original work published 1972)
Baudrillard, J. (1975/1977). The mirror of production (M. Poster, Trans.). Telos Press.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967)
Kant, I. (1998). Critique of pure reason (P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1781/1787)
Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rough draft) (M. Nicolaus, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work written 1857–1858)
Marx, K. (1976). Capital: A critique of political economy. Volume I (B. Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1867)
Nietzsche, F. (1979). On truth and lies in an extra-moral sense. In D. Breazeale (Ed. & Trans.), Philosophy and truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s notebooks of the early 1870s (pp. 79–97). Humanities Press. (Original work written 1873)
Saussure, F. de. (1986). Course in general linguistics (R. Harris, Trans.). Open Court. (Original work published 1916)
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