Reification, Value, and Emancipation: Revisiting the Normative Core of Marx’s Critique of Capitalism (Preprint)

This article reexamines the normative dimension of Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, arguing that value theory, reification, and the logic of capital carry intrinsic ethical implications. Against interpretations that distance Marxism from questions of justice or morality, it draws on the method of immanent critique to show how concepts such as freedom, autonomy, and equality are not external ideals imposed upon capitalist society, but contradictions immanent to it. Through close engagement with Marx’s analyses of alienation, the value-form, and the autonomy of capital, the article demonstrates how capitalist social relations systematically obscure and invert human purposes. Value appears to act autonomously, while human agency is rendered derivative - a dynamic that constitutes the core of reification. By reconnecting these processes to Marx’s emancipatory vision, the paper reconstructs the normative core of his critique and its relevance for contemporary forms of domination, including platform labor, digital commodification, and ecological crisis. Rather than offering a moralizing perspective, Marx’s method grounds critique in the contradictions of capitalist modernity itself. In doing so, it provides not only a structural diagnosis of social domination, but a normative horizon oriented toward emancipation, grounded in the historical and material conditions that constrain and enable human freedom.