Work Classification Layer
Compare Works
Pick two or more works to set their attribute fingerprints, dimension-by-dimension passages, and shared school embodiments side by side. Especially useful for author-stage comparisons (Wittgenstein early vs late) and for setting a single tradition's foundational texts against each other.
Capital, Volume I
The commodity form is the cell of capitalist society — value, labour, surplus, accumulation, and crisis follow from its dialectical analysis
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | Capital, Volume I (Late) |
|---|---|
| Time · Extent | Infinite |
| Time · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Time · Grain | Continuous |
| Time · Freedom | Both |
| Time · Traversability | Linear |
| Time · Dimensionality | One |
| Time · Direction | Uni-directional |
| Space · Extent | Infinite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Infinite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Local |
| Observer · Time Instance | Single |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Immediate |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Total |
| Observer · Physicality | Embodied |
| Observer · Agency | Active |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | None |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Constructed |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Infinite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Relational |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Non-conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Non-conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Continuous |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
Capital, Volume I
Time in Capital is the medium of historical-material development. The historical materialism that frames the work treats epochs (slave, feudal, capitalist) as developmental stages with their own internal dialectical dynamics. Within capitalism, socially necessary labour time is the measure of value (chapter 1). Time Freedom is Both: there is real historical necessity in the long run, real political agency in the short.
Space
Capital, Volume I
Standard nineteenth-century mechanical-Newtonian space is presupposed. Marx's analysis of capital's globalisation (ch. 31) is implicitly spatial — capitalism's drive to the world market constitutes the historically real globalised space — but this is sociological, not metaphysical.
Matter
Capital, Volume I
Substantival; the productive forces of society work on real material objects. Use-value depends on the material properties of commodities; exchange-value is a social abstraction from them. Matter is real, conserved, locally interactive.
Observer
Capital, Volume I
The Marxian observer is embodied, plural, and class-positioned. Knowledge is immediate (workers know their own labour) but ideologically structured (workers under capitalism are systematically mystified about the source of value). Agency is active — the proletariat becomes the historical subject when it grasps its own situation in the productive process. Metaphysical agency is None — Marx is a thoroughgoing atheist; religion is the "opium of the people" in the 1844 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, and Capital extends this analysis.
Energy
Capital, Volume I
The labour theory of value is implicitly energetic: labour is the expenditure of human productive energy over time, congealed in commodities. Standard thermodynamic background; energy substantival and irreversibly dissipative.
Information
Capital, Volume I
Commodity fetishism (ch. 1.4) is the central informational thesis: the social information that "this thing is the crystallisation of this much labour time" is systematically distorted into the misleading appearance that value is an intrinsic property of objects. Information is relational and non-conserved in this precise sense — capitalist social relations actively obscure their own informational structure.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
Capital has been read in radically different ways since 1867: as economic science, as Hegelian critique, as a foundation for revolutionary politics, as a sociology of modernity, as a literary work. The relation between Marx's philosophical (1844 Manuscripts, German Ideology) and mature economic (Capital) writings has been the central twentieth-century interpretive dispute (Althusser's "epistemological break" vs the continuity reading). The labour theory of value itself has been contested since the marginalist revolution of the 1870s; whether it should be read as a strict empirical claim or as a structural analytic device remains live among Marxist economists.