Marx's update of cultural theory

The unprecedented debts caused by the overflow of fictitious capital in postmillennial postmodern capitalism tend to create the impression that the current phase of capitalism is governed by fundamentally new laws and, as such, no longer can be grasped through Karl Marx’s framework of political economy. To judge the truth of this impression, we must Wrst differentiate between the two realms of cognition: the empirical and the transcendental. Marx’s analysis of political economy pertains to the latter, and it is in this capacity that it provides cultural theory with the categories required for the analysis of culture.