The article centers on a discussion of Frank Ruda's chapter in the anthology Reading Marx, in which he argues that the history of emancipatory thought is a series of footnotes to Plato's Cave. In considering emancipation to be a way out of the non-or pre-human state, Marx becomes the thinker closest to Plato. According to Ruda, a critique of capitalism must be based on the refutation of the myth of the (unconditional) given, which he identifies with the ideological operation of naturalization. Capitalist naturalization dependent on abstraction and abstraction from abstraction ends by reducing the worker to the state of an animal. However, this is a strange animal that has nothing to do with real animals, and therefore should be called a nonanimal. The way out of the Cave turns out to be the realization that the figure of the non-animal does not conceal within itself an unalienated substance and that no positive utopia lies beyond the Cave - on the contrary, the path to liberation leads to the Real of the shadows themselves, to a kind of negative utopia. Accepting Ruda's general line of reasoning, the author of the article nevertheless wonders whether this interpretation that Ruda has put forward is the kind of new way to read Marx to which Reading Marx aspires. The author compares this interpretation with one from the Marxist legacy proposed by Michel Henry and with Francois Laruelle's non-Marxism (which is an extension of Henry's thought). Their example shows that naturalization could be not only a target in the criticism of capitalism but also a method for that criticism. The myth of the unconditional given has been countered by Henry with a myth about the given which coincides with its condition. Then according to non-Marxism, the myth of the givenness conditions is what is be overcome instead of the myth about the given. That argument is illustrated by Katerina Kolozova's denunciation of the anthropocentric orientation of the critique of capitalism, which holds that the animal has been reduced to the non-animal in capitalism in exactly the same way as human beings have been and draws the conclusion that in the last instance both animal and human are generically identical.
