Given the reverberations of Greek thought within the German Enlightenment, it will be no surprise to find the cave allegory echoing in the work of one of its most critical thinkers when he comes to consider the relationships between seeing, knowing, and acting in the world. Yet we might be surprised at the resonances of religious reflection—many of them sharing much with those of Nikephoros—in the thought of Karl Marx, a life-long opponent of organized religion. In a searching analysis of Capital as a literary text, J. Hillis Miller avers that “Marx's language in his analysis of commodities is permeated by a displaced theological or ontological terminology and figuration.” “Displaced,” yes, but in the sense of having shifted from one (medieval) economy to another (modern) one, which it haunts. This is an action performed not by Marx himself but by the facts of the matter, as he explicitly states in a section entitled “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”:

Volume 1 of Capital is subtitled A Critique of Political Economy and is devoted to an extended analysis of the “The Process of Production of Capital.” Its first chapter, on commodities, begins from this observation: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity.” The chapter defines the nature of commodities, and how they are produced, exchanged, and consumed in societies dominated by the bourgeoisie. Marx shows that crucial to these operations is the distinction between the value that inheres in an object produced by labor for a purpose, which he calls “use-value,” and that which comes into operation when it is exchanged, which he names, variously, “exchange-value” or simply “value.”