Through the unique power of mental abstraction in materialist dialectics, Das Kapital reconstructs people’s understanding of social reality, corrects the sensuous intuition and external reflection of things, and points out the starting points, boundaries, levels, and perspectives for people to grasp things. It establishes a unique way of thinking for understanding, researching, reconstructing, and acting upon things, connecting the formation process of things themselves with the overall social relations to which they belong, and revealing the ways of constitution among different levels, fields, and internal components of capitalist social reality, thus reproducing the complex totality of social relations in capitalism. Only on the basis of understanding and reconstructing social reality can a specific understanding and overall grasp of the true content of things be established, highlighting the historical sense of reality in theoretical research that targets social reality, and forming an “archaeology of knowledge” that inquires into the internal connections between conceptual categories and social reality. This is the touchstone required by materialist dialectics to evaluate the rationality of contemporary social science research.

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  LiuTingting

　　From:Seeker.2025.No.1.