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The question of abstraction with Marx does not pertain to a question of epistemology, which would require a distinction between bad abstractions, too generic and indeterminate, and good ones, specific and determined. Abstractions are real, and have a power of domination exercised upon the social forms which are their content. The emancipation of living labor is that of an energheia which is thought as an adequate concept incompletely materialized in the real social world.