We obtain the concept of capital in exactly the same way as Feuerbach obtains his concept of God: we create God in our image. We, humans, are finite; however, when attributes of ours are made infinite and absolute, and extrapolated as attributes of an entity beyond us, we have created God. Similarly, if we extrapolate the wish to accumulate material wealth and make it infinite and absolute, we arrive at the concept of capital. This idealization occurs in a specific material context—namely, the age of capitalist commodity production—without which we could never have conceived the idea of capital. Capital is an idealization of ourselves, projected onto an object outside us. True economic theory is a definition shaped by capital itself. Capital is certainly a form of “software”; capitalism comes into being when the right kind of material conditions (a “value space”) enables this software—the logic of capital—to play itself out. Logic belongs to capital, but history is ours. Our method must assert that self-abstraction and self-synthesis are not mere ideas, but factual tendencies inherent in the nature of capital itself. Engels, Lenin, and the entire school of dialectical materialism overlooked this crucial point completely.