It must have taken some two years when in the background of my university studies I scribbled mountains of paper, seizing upon every one of the vital terms occurring in the first sixty pages of Capital, turning them round and round for definitions, and above all for metaphorical significance, taking them to pieces and putting them together again. And what resulted from this exercise was the unshakeable certainty of the penetrating truth of Marxist thinking, combined with an equally unshakeable doubt about the theoretical consistency of the commodity analysis as it stood. There were more and other things in it than Marx had succeeded in reaching! And finally, with an effort of concentration bordering on madness, it came upon me that in the innermost core of the commodity structure there was to be found the ‘transcendental subject’. Without need to say so, it was obvious to everybody that this was sheer lunacy, and no one was squeamish about telling me so! But I knew that I had grasped the beginning of a thread whose end was not yet in sight. But the secret identity of commodity form and thought form which I had glimpsed was so hidden within the bourgeois world that my first naive attempts to make others see it only had the result that I was given up as a hopeless case.
- Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Preface, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, 1978