Since the student movement and its attempts at an avant-garde reading of Marx, the works of Hans-Georg Backhaus have undoubtedly been among the best that can be read in this country on the subject. This particularly pertains to his interpretation of the first hundred pages of Karl Marx's Capital, which are commonly regarded as difficult to understand and often skipped over—specifically, the so-called analysis of the value form. Even the old Bebel claimed that this was something only for philosophers. In contrast, Backhaus demonstrates that philosophy in Marx, when the problem is properly framed, reveals that everything else is esoteric and, more importantly, a provocation for social criticism, an antidote to the common-sense notion of critique as applied in critical rationalism. It concerns the critique of a Marx interpretation that until recently was among the few undisputed ones.